JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Liam Coen was deeply immersed in the planning and preparation process for the launch of his first season as an NFL head coach when the curveball came his way.
The Jacksonville Jaguars braintrust had decided to move up in the draft and select University of Colorado two-way phenom Travis Hunter with the understanding that they would grant his wish and allow him to play both wide receiver and cornerback in the NFL on a full-time basis.
While engineering the framework for how he wanted things to operate during his first head coaching job, Coen — a former UMass quarterback who enjoyed a meteoric rise that took him from assistant wide receivers coach with the Los Angeles Rams in 2018 to running his own show in Jacksonville just seven years later — drew upon the lessons he learned from Sean McVay in Los Angeles and Todd Bowles in Tampa Bay. He even took bits and pieces of knowledge gleaned during two stints as offensive coordinator at the University of Kentucky that were wedged between his time with the Rams and Buccaneers.
But as Coen processed all of the elements that it would take to give Hunter the best chance of succeeding as the NFL’s first two-way player in more than six decades, while also ensuring the Jaguars get the best return on their investment, he realized that in this regard, his mentors had little to offer him.
“No other coaches dealt with this,” Coen recalled. “Really, you have to go back and look at high school because players go both ways.”
It didn’t take Coen long to realize the Travis Hunter Experience would require hours upon hours of planning and communication, and that the Jaguars staff would have to be just as painstakingly strategic with Hunter off the field as they were on it — if not more.
The plan called for a patient and gradual approach for introducing Hunter to the NFL rather than baptism by fire. The process featured a few hiccups, including an upper body injury that forced Hunter out of the final two preseason games. However, as the preseason concluded last week, Jaguars general manager James Gladstone declared the franchise’s most intriguing star fully healthy, and said the plan remains for him to open the regular season later this week as both a wide receiver and cornerback.
“He’s on the grass today and rolling full speed,” Gladstone told reporters on Wednesday. “There hasn’t been any shift on that front. We expect him to be who we know him to be, and that’s somebody who impacts both sides of the football, and can’t wait to see that on Sundays and one Monday night here this season.
For Coen and the Jaguars, getting Hunter to this point has required as much of a science experiment-type of approach as it has innovative X’ing and O’ing.
Obviously, Coen and his coaches had to create a plan to teach him the offense and defense and how to handle practice time and meetings with both position groups and units. But preparing for Hunter also involved ensuring the Jaguars had enough support staff members — athletic trainers, player engagement and sports science technicians, dietitians — to monitor and support him.
The football education plan called for Hunter to focus primarily on receiver during offseason practices. Once training camp kicked off back in July, offense initially commanded most of his time as well: two days on offense, a defensive day, and then a return to offense. The thinking was that it would take more time for Hunter to develop chemistry and timing with quarterback Trevor Lawrence than it would for him to learn how to fit into the framework of the secondary. But even on those days when Hunter practiced strictly on offense, during any break in action, such as a special teams segment, he would meet alone with members of the defensive coaching staff to go over assignments for cornerbacks with assistants serving as receivers during those jog-throughs.
When the Jaguars held their first intrasquad scrimmage, Hunter saw time with both units. The same was the case in Jacksonville’s preseason opener against Pittsburgh when Hunter played 11 of the 12 first-team offensive plays (recording two catches for 9 yards) and eight defensive snaps (but recording no statistics).
Travis Hunter had two catches for 9 yards in his one game of action in the preseason against the Steelers. (Travis Register / Imagn Images)
By the third week of training camp, Hunter had begun practicing on both sides of the ball on the same day. This meant non-stop action for the receiver/corner, which was nothing new for him. But a double-sized workload also meant vigilant monitoring by the members of the sports science and performance team, strength and conditioning and dietary staff to make sure Hunter didn’t overdo it.
Jaguars offensive coordinator Grant Udinski told reporters this summer, “I don’t know that I’ve seen (anybody) with that level of conditioning before.”
So overdoing it didn’t mean concerns about Hunter wearing himself out. Instead, the Jaguars worked to ensure Hunter’s relentless motor didn’t work other elements of his body.
“All of our players wear the Catapult trackers, right? They all get tracked. Well, that’s really important for him because he’s a guy that obviously runs a ton all throughout the day,” Coen said of the 6-foot, 185-pound Hunter. “But we also want to make sure he’s putting weight on right and gaining weight, because he’s a little bit on the lighter side coming in. Well, it’s hard to balance, because, well, how many calories he burns in a day, what he actually needs to eat to replenish, but also to add, to get weight on him.”
The Jaguars declined to reveal how much mileage Hunter racks up on a typical practice day. However, according to sports medicine staffers from two other NFL teams, the average wide receiver or defensive back who plays one side of the ball plus special teams generally logs between 6,000 and 7,000 yards of running — the latter is closer to 4 miles — on a high-volume practice day. It’s conceivable that Hunter’s daily training camp yardage would top that, even though he doesn’t play on special teams.
Coen described every day as a teaching moment for the Jaguars’ performance staffers and coaches as they both monitor Hunter’s workload on the practice field, in the weight room and when scheduling his meetings with coaches to make up for time missed with one unit while attending another unit’s classroom session.
“It’s learning where we’re like, ‘Man, OK, we need to trim it here,’ to make sure that he has more time in order to get his lift in, get his extra working or even get more food in his stomach, so that we can continue to make sure that he’s on track to play however many snaps we’re going to have to play him in a game.”
Coen said the Catapult trackers also help hold Hunter accountable. A fierce competitor who takes pride in his conditioning and ability to handle heavy workloads, he’ll never tell his coaches if he’s getting tired. But the trackers don’t lie.
“Every single day, we get his miles per hour, his yardage, his high-end speed, max velocities and percentages that he’s hitting every day,” the coach said. “And that’s something within practice that we need to make sure he’s hitting, or identifying, ‘Man, we went too far here. We need to trim some of this down.’ It’s all analytics. In some ways, we have to protect him from himself.”
The Jaguars also declined to reveal what type of pace or speed they like to see from Hunter to ensure that he’s performing at an optimal level. (For example, some teams want to see their defensive backs hit 20 miles per hour multiple times during a practice session to indicate top-level performance.) But Chris Bach, the team’s director of performance science, said through a spokesman that “while there is no single ‘magic number’ that guarantees protection from overtraining, the health and performance team closely monitors (Hunter’s) workloads and his individual responses to those loads over time.” At the end of each day, the team compares Hunter’s latest numbers to his historical data and also compares them to the benchmarks set for defensive backs and receivers to gain a good understanding of how the rookie’s workloads are being managed.
The Jaguars closely monitor the mileage and speed Travis Hunter logs every day at practice. (Julio Aguilar / Getty Images)
The regular season will represent a continuation of experimentation for the Jaguars. They didn’t get to see how Hunter managed the workload throughout the preseason because that upper body injury suffered in a team scrimmage on Aug. 14 wound up sidelining him for close to two weeks.
Coen told reporters in Jacksonville last Wednesday that while he was disappointed Hunter didn’t make it through the preseason unscathed, he still deems camp and the preseason a success in terms of how the Jaguars managed the rookie. Coen also believes the lessons from the last two months will help the staff during the regular season.
“It’ll be very similar to where, based on how we do it, the (starting) offense goes and then the (starting) defense goes separate,” he said. “So that’s kind of, you can get him in on both of those based on the rep count and if he’s in with whichever group, whether it’s the first or the second group to get reps, it’s about maximizing, especially now because those reps trim down in the course of a practice. So, we’re not going to get maybe those 40, 50 reps in each practice that we’ve been consistently getting through training camp.”
The juggling will also require careful planning and communication between Jaguars wide receivers coach Edgar Bennett and secondary coach Ron Milus to determine which plays Hunter is needed on offense and defense.
“A Day 1 install that we’ve run four, five times now or whatever it is, he doesn’t probably need that rep on a Wednesday,” Coen said. “Let’s make the most of his reps and make sure that he’s getting the quality work that he needs.”
The Jaguars have visions of Hunter making his mark as a once-in-a-generation type player delivering electrifying plays on both sides of the ball. They’ll give him every opportunity to do so, but not without maintaining a watchful eye on his every move.
(Top photo: Logan Bowles / Getty Images)