Every week we bring you all the inactives from the 1 p.m. ET games in one post, constantly updated with the latest information.
There never seemed to be a chance that quarterback Jordan Love would play for the Packers this week, but the team declined to rule him out ahead of Sunday’s game against the Colts. They did downgrade him to doubtful on Saturday, however, and he is officially out after being placed on the inactive list 90 minutes ahead of kickoff.
Malik Willis will start for the Packers and he will have wide receiver Jayden Reed available to catch passes. Reed was listed as questionable due to calf and shin injuries.
The Colts will be without wide receiver Josh Downs again this week because of an ankle injury, but defensive tackle DeForest Buckner will play despite a back injury.
Colts at Packers
Colts: WR Josh Downs, QB Sam Ehlinger, DB Julian Blackmon, OL Tanor Bortolini, OL Blake Freeland, TE Will Mallory, DL Genard Avery
Packers: QB Jordan Love, S Kitan Oladapo, DL Brenton Cox Jr., T Andre Dillard, T Travis Glover, DL Colby Wooden
Jets at Titans
Jets: CB D.J. Reed, T Max Mitchell, T Carter Warren, DL Leonard Taylor, DL Eric Watts, RB Israel Abanikanda
Titans: DB Julius Wood, LB Caleb Murphy, LB James Williams, OL John Ojukwu, TE David Martin-Robinson, TE Thomas Odukoya
Raiders at Ravens
Raiders: DE Tyree Wilson, CB Decamerion Richardson, RB Dylan Laube, OL Jackson Powers-Johnson, WR Tyreik McAllister, WR Ramel Keyton, S Thomas Harper
Ravens: WR Devontez Walker, OL Malaesala Aumavae-Laulu, OL Nick Samac, LB Adisa Isaac, CB Nate Wiggins, CB T.J. Tampa, S Beau Brade
Browns at Jaguars
Browns: QB Dorian Thompson-Robinson, CB Kahlef Hailassie, G Javion Cohen, T Jedrick Wills, T Jack Conklin, WR Jamari Thrash, TE David Njoku
Jaguars: S Darnell Savage, OL Javon Foster, OL Cole Van Lanen, DL Tyler Lacy, DL Maason Smith, DL Jordan Jefferson
49ers at Vikings
49ers: QB Josh Dobbs, S Talanoa Hufanga, CB Darrell Luter, G Ben Bartch, LB Dee Winters
Vikings: QB Brett Rypien, WR Jordan Addison, T Walter Rouse, DL Levi Drake Rodriguez, DL Jalen Redmond, CB Fabian Moreau, CB Dwight McGlothern
Chargers at Panthers
Chargers: S Alohi Gilman, WR Brenden Rice, RB Kimani Vidal, DL Justin Eboigbe, OL Jordan McFadden, QB Taylor Heinicke, CB Tarheeb Still
Panthers: CB Chau Smith-Wade, CB Shemar Bartholomew, RB Mike Boone, C Andrew Raym, G Jarrett Kingston, TE Messiah Swinson
Seahawks at Patriots
Seahawks: RB Kenneth Walker, T George Fant, LB Uchenna Nwosu, OL Olu Oluwatimi, TE Pharaoh Brown, OL Michael Jerrell, OL Sataoa Laumea
Patriots: G Sidy Sow, WR Kayshon Boutte, OL Demontrey Jacobs, LB Curtis Jacobs, QB Joe Milton
Saints at Cowboys
Saints: WR A.T. Perry, QB Spencer Rattler, CB Marshon Lattimore, DT Khalen Saunders, LB D’Marco Jackson, LB Jaylan Ford, TE Dallin Holker
Cowboys: TE Jake Ferguson, QB Trey Lance, CB Andrew Booth, LB Buddy Johnson, WR Ryan Flournoy, TE John Stephens Jr., OT Matt Waletzko
Giants at Commanders
Giants: S Anthony Johnson, CB Nick McCloud, LB Darius Muasau, LB Boogie Basham, G Jake Kubas, QB Tommy DeVito
Commanders: CB Emmanuel Forbes, DE Jamin Davis, G Chris Paul, LB Dominique Hampton, WR Jamison Crowder, S Darrick Forrest, QB Sam Hartman
Buccaneers at Lions
Buccaneers: TE Devin Culp, T Luke Goedeke, CB Josh Hayes, DL Calijah Kancey, LB Jose Ramirez, DL Ben Stille, S Antoine Winfield
Lions: DL Marcus Davenport, S Ifeatu Melifonwu, CB Ennis Rakestraw, LB Trevor Nowaske, OL Giovanni Manu, WR Isaiah Williams
Until the Vikings and receiver Justin Jefferson worked out a new contract, it wasn’t clear whether they would. And it prompted some teams to call about possibly trading for him.
One such team, via Adam Schefter of ESPN.com, was the 49ers.
Per the report, the 49ers “checked in” on Jefferson’s availability. The Vikings said he wasn’t.
The Jets and Colts also had “some level of interest” in trading for Jefferson, Schefter reports.
The 49ers made the call before their own contract drama played out with receiver Brandon Aiyuk, who was taken three picks after Jefferson in 2020.
The question for the Vikings was whether to pay Jefferson and, if not, whether to trade him. We actually heard scuttlebutt during the first round of the 2024 draft that the Vikings tried to move up with the Chargers to No. 5 to get receiver Malik Nabers, a move that might have been followed by Jefferson suddenly becoming available.
It’s a basic matter of roster construction and cap management. The Vikings are paying Jefferson $35 million per year in new money. They could have had Nabers in the fifth overall slot for $33 million over four years. Not per year, total.
While the Vikings and Jefferson eventually renewed their vows in June, that doesn’t mean it was always destined to happen. Jefferson wanted what he wanted, and the Vikings weren’t prepared to give it to him. Only after they changed their tune did the deal get done.
But it now is. And the 49ers will have to deal with Jefferson later today.
When the 49ers last went to Minnesota for a Monday night game in 2023, Jefferson was injured. The Vikings still somehow found a way to win, anyway.
The 49ers managed to avoid punishment for the apparent concealment of running back Christian McCaffrey’s true injury status on Monday, in large part because the NFL doesn’t need to be telling the world that teams are violating the letter or spirit of the injury-reporting rules.
The specific question as to McCaffrey was whether the 49ers should have downgraded him from questionable to doubtful or out before putting him on the list of inactive players 90 minutes before kickoff.
So we asked the league the question of whether a team has an obligation to downgrade a player the moment they know the player’s status has changed.
“If after the team arrives at the stadium on game day, a club conducts a workout for a player to determine if the player will be able to start or play in the game, the club is not required to update its Game Status Report if the club determines that the player will not start or will not play,” the league said in an email to PFT. “In this situation, the club is permitted to wait until the 90-minute meeting to list the player on its Inactive List.”
That creates a very significant loophole, allowing teams to keep the information secret until 90 minutes before kickoff — even if the team knows otherwise.
The message is clear: Characterize every questionable player as a game-time decision. And then just keep his true status a secret until 90 minutes before kickoff.
The numbers are in for the 2024 debut of Thursday Night Football. The audience was strong despite a stinker of a game, with an average audience of 14.96 million.
The Bills-Dolphins number was slightly down from last year’s Week 2 TNF game between the Vikings and Eagles, which averaged 15.05 million.
There’s no shame in that. Last night’s game wasn’t very competitive.
The Bills-Dolphins game peaked at 18.09 million between 9:15 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. ET, an all-time high for TNF on Amazon Prime. That’s when the game was still in doubt.
The audience for the Week 2 contest beat last year’s overall TNF average by 26 percent.
The strong numbers should continue next week, when Aaron Rodgers and the Jets host the Patriots, who will at least be 1-1 and could be 2-0. The Jets could be 0-2 — and thus would be very desperate for a win.
While traditional network broadcasts still outperform streaming, streaming is catching up. Slowly but surely.
The gap will continue to narrow as the audience that grew up on traditional TV continues to yield to generations of folks who have always known streaming.
The great unknown continues to be whether the streaming ceiling will ever match the ceiling for old-school TV.
One of the NFL’s official slogan goes like this: “Football is family.”
And, at times, the NFL has to protect the family.
That’s the best way to explain the league’s statement, dumped into the late Friday afternoon news cycle, regarding the 49ers’ mishandling of running back Christian McCaffrey’s injury status for Week 1.
To summarize, the 49ers listed McCaffrey as questionable on Saturday with a calf and Achilles injury. He was never downgraded. On Monday, ninety minutes before kickoff, his name appeared on the list of inactive players.
After running back Jordan Mason let the cat out of the bag following his 28-carry performance in place of McCaffrey, PFT asked the league about the situation. The comment was, “No comment.”
Here’s today’s comment from the league: “We looked into the 49ers’ reporting of the playing status of Christian McCaffrey for the team’s Monday night game against the New York Jets. We have found no evidence of a violation of the league’s Injury Report Policy in this matter.”
If they found no evidence, they weren’t looking very hard. Which is no surprise. The league has no interest in exposing this type of misconduct by teams, not in a world of widespread legalized gambling. If the NFL had whacked the 49ers, the murmurs from those who were screwed (via prop bets and/or fantasy football) by the 49ers’ concealment of McCaffrey’s status would have become a full-blown uproar.
No, the league has no interest in exposing anything that undermines the integrity of the broad range of wagers that are made on its product. That’s the quickest way to have Congress inserting probes into places where those being probed don’t want probes to probe.
At some point between Saturday and Monday, the 49ers knew McCaffrey’s expected availability was less than 50-50. He didn’t spontaneously slip from the 51-99 percent range (which is the meaning of “questionable”) to zero percent in the moment the 49ers were compiling their list of inactive players. (As Mason tells it, the 49ers knew about it before Saturday.) He should have been downgraded, to doubtful or out, at some point before the inactive players were identified.
By whacking the 49ers for this, the NFL would have invited a whacking of its own. The league’s sports book partners might have had to refund bets, which might have prompted them to ask the league to foot the bill. And how could anyone even begin to unring the bell regarding the mess that the 49ers’ apparent ruse created for fantasy football?
No, the NFL gains nothing by finding that the 49ers did anything wrong. Even though the circumstantial evidence and basic common sense strongly suggests they did.
Keep that in mind whenever the league investigates one of its teams. The end result is precisely as reliable as the annual audit of Henhouse Industries conducted by the accounting firm of Fox & Coyote, PLLC.
The Jets managed just 68 rushing yards on 19 carries and three rushing first downs in Monday night’s loss to the 49ers, but Jets coach Robert Saleh believes that says less about his own offense than it says about the 49ers’ defense.
Specifically, Saleh said 49ers linebacker Fred Warner was such a dominant force against the run that he deserves most of the credit for what the Jets failed to do. Saleh was the 49ers’ defensive coordinator for the first three years of Warner’s career, and Monday night was Saleh’s first time coaching against Warner.
“Fred is, I’ll go ahead and say it, the guy is a first-ballot Hall of Famer. I don’t know if a lot of people recognize that, but he is,” Saleh said. “At times during the game it felt like there were three of him out there, the way he was running around. It was a different feeling being on the opposite sideline for the first time ever in his career to watch it. He did a lot of things. There were a couple of plays that are touchdowns versus 25 other teams, and he came out of nowhere to save it. So, credit to him, he’s an unbelievable football player, but our run game was damn close, just like the passing game was close. But obviously we didn’t get the opportunities we wanted.”
On Sunday, Saleh’s Jets take on the Titans, and Saleh will hope that his running offense looks better against a defense that doesn’t have Fred Warner.
Wide receiver Mike Williams played a minor role in the Jets offense during their season-opening loss to the 49ers, but the team says that they’ll be working to change that in the coming games.
Williams is coming off a torn ACL and didn’t play in the preseason after signing with the Jets this spring, so it’s not surprising that the team eased him into the mix in his first game. Nine snaps is still a low number, however, and head coach Robert Saleh said the plan to get Williams more time was impacted by only running 51 offensive plays. The hope is for more on all fronts against the Titans in Week Two and in the weeks to follow.
“We were trying to get to 15 last week,” Saleh said, via SNY. “Obviously, there weren’t enough opportunities. We were pacing that a little bit. If we would have gotten to a 65-play game like it normally would be, we would have been on pace. Long story short, we’re trying to get him on the field more.”
There’s plenty of things the Jets would like to see go differently after losing the opener and Williams’s impact on the offense is one of the top items on that list.
Titans receiver DeAndre Hopkins is off the team’s injury report this week after being limited by his knee injury all of last week.
Coach Brian Callahan expects Hopkins to have a bigger role this week after he played only 17 snaps and made one catch for 8 yards.
“Likely to be closer to full,” Callahan said this week. “Still be mindful of what we’re asking as he gets in shape and starts to feel better and better. But, yeah, I see his role increasing.”
A week ago, Hopkins said he tore his medial collateral ligament in a July 31 practice, causing him to miss all of training camp. On Thursday, Hopkins clarified that his knee injury is a sprain.
“A sprain is a sprain and a tear is a tear. If it was a tear, I wouldn’t be here right now. It was a sprain,” Hopkins said, via Jim Wyatt of the team website.
Hopkins led the Titans with 75 receptions for 1,057 yards and seven touchdowns last season, but they added Calvin Ridley and Tyler Boyd to the receivers room this offseason.
Jamal Adams has missed 29 of the past 39 games, but he guarantees he will play this week against his former team and against Aaron Rodgers.
“I’ll be there,” Adams said, via Nick Suss of The Tennessean. “Oh, I’ll be there. Oh yeah, I’ll be there. I’ll be there.”
Adams, who missed the season opener with a hip injury, had a full practice Wednesday. It was one of fewer than 10 times he has practiced in any capacity since signing with the Titans in July.
Injuries to his left quad and a knee cut short the past two seasons for Adams, who was drafted in the first round by the Jets in 2017 and traded to the Seahawks in 2020. He said his hip injury this season isn’t directly connected to those injuries but a by-product of what the toll of the injuries have done to his body and his routine.
He said missing out on training camp in 2022 and 2023 prevented him from developing the “callouses” he needed.
“As a football player, you definitely need those things to get ready for the season because it’s a long season,” Adams said. “Games are long — 60 minutes. I feel like my body kind of went in shock a little bit. It just wasn’t ready. Well, I’m not going to say it wasn’t ready. But it was just more so like it wasn’t used to the cutting and the conditioning as much and a constant pace of football. . . . I was feeling good. And it just so happened that it didn’t work out for me. My body just kind of locked up on me for whatever reason. I had to listen to it. I know my body now. As shitty as it is, obviously I want to be out there with my team, but it didn’t work out like that for me.”
Aaron Rodgers didn’t spell the word this time, but he sent the same message to the Jets that he once sent to the Packers.
Rodgers said everyone needed to “R-E-L-A-X” after the Packers started 1-2 in the 2014 season and he said that the same advice applies to the Jets as they move forward from the 32-19 loss to the 49ers on Monday night. Rodgers said the team has to “stick to the process” because there’s a lot more football to be played.
“I think we always gotta stay relaxed,” Rodgers said. “It’s a long season. I think, at times, people think the season is like you’re out in the prairie or the desert and you’re wandering around trying to find water. It’s more like a nice, slow Bolero, where we’re just swaying with the music and reacting to whatever comes to us and through us, just trying to not get too high with the highs or too low with the lows. The league is a lot different than when I said relax years ago in that there’s just so much more coverage, so much more opportunity for overreaction.”
The Jets weren’t favored to win on the road against the defending NFC champions, so it’s not a tough sell to hold off on panic even if the team didn’t look as good as they would have hoped. Another sluggish performance against the Titans this week is unlikely to be so easy to shrug off as part of the process.
