MJD Provides Important Context for Travis Hunter’s 1st NFL Season

Justin Fields will make his first start for the Jets, Sam Darnold begins a new era in Seattle and J.J. McCarthy launches his NFL career with Minnesota. Davante Adams is now catching Matthew Stafford’s passes next to Puka Nacua and Ben Johnson has taken his offensive mastermind to Chicago.

But there’s one NFL debut with more universal excitement than all of them. When, where and how will Jacksonville’s Travis Hunter launch his career? We’ll find out next week, when the league announces the full 272-game schedule on Wednesday night. One individual who can’t wait is former Jaguars running back Maurice Jones-Drew.

“The Jaguars made the blockbuster move of the 2025 NFL Draft when they traded up for two-way star Travis Hunter,” Jones-Drew wrote Wednesday on NFL.com. “Now the question is: How will first-year head coach Liam Coen utilize Hunter and his immense talent?”

Jones-Drew noted that Hunter played 1,460 snaps during his final season at Colorado, averaging 112.3 per game. Over the last decade, no NFL player has averaged more than 78 per game.

“I'd love to watch the generational talent play both sides of the ball,” said Jones-Drew, “as he could impact Jacksonville's passing game as a playmaking receiver and the pass defense as a ballhawk in the secondary. We won't know exactly how Coen plans to deploy the rookie until September.”

Without the benefit of offseason and training camp practices, Coen explained his initial plans for deploying Hunter just hours after drafting him on April 24.

“It's a little bit more than a ‘we’ll see,’ but we do have to be fluid throughout, right?” Coen said. “We’ll have a plan right now of primarily on offense with learning the defensive system
and practicing on the defensive side of the ball as well throughout this offseason program.

“As we continue to grow, we have to be fluid throughout this whole process. We’ve had
multiple conversations at length with athletic training, equipment, sports science,
forward. We have a plan in place, and that’s really where we’ll start.”

The on-field portion of that start begins Friday at the team’s rookie minicamp, a day after Hunter walks across the stage at the University of Colorado, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology.