Jaguars Open Title Defense With Travis Hunter Cleared for Camp

The Jacksonville Jaguars opened the doors on their title defense this week, and the best piece of Jacksonville Jaguars news arrived right on cue: Travis Hunter is expected to be fully cleared for the start of training camp. Rookies, quarterbacks and injured players reported to the Miller Electric Center on Saturday, veterans check in Tuesday, and the first practice of Liam Coen's second summer runs Wednesday. A year ago this was a franchise selling hope. Now it's the defending AFC South champion coming off a 13-4 season, welcoming back the No. 2 overall pick from a knee injury that cut short one of the most fascinating rookie experiments the league has ever staged.

Travis Hunter Is Back — Now What?

The details, because they matter: Hunter tore the LCL in his right knee at practice on October 30 last season and had surgery on November 11. Before the injury he'd played seven games, catching 28 passes for 298 yards and a touchdown across 324 offensive snaps while adding 15 tackles on 162 defensive snaps — a genuine two-way workload no rookie had attempted in the modern era. The rehab has gone fast. By early July he was clocked running over 20 miles per hour, faster than his pre-injury peak, and NFL Media's Cameron Wolfe reported he's expected to be fully cleared when camp opens. That's a meaningful shift from earlier in the summer, when Coen himself wouldn't commit to Hunter's availability.

The clearance just reopens the real debate: what is he? Reports this offseason suggested the Jaguars might lean him toward cornerback with a reduced receiver menu, and Hunter publicly pushed back on that framing. With Brian Thomas Jr. and Parker Washington both trending up at wideout, the football logic of playing Hunter heavily on defense is stronger than it was a year ago. How the snaps get divided in August will tell us what the plan actually is, as opposed to what anyone says it is.

Jaguars Roster Moves: PUP Placements to Start the Week

The first transactions of camp week landed Sunday, when Jacksonville placed offensive linemen Garrett DiGiorgio and Cole Van Lanen on the active/physically unable to perform list. Neither move is a season-ender — players on active/PUP can be activated as soon as they pass a physical — but Van Lanen's is worth tracking, since he also missed OTAs and minicamp and the interior depth behind the starters is not a strength. The report-and-ramp schedule from here:

• July 25: Rookies, quarterbacks and injured players reported
• July 26: DiGiorgio and Van Lanen placed on active/PUP
• July 28: Veterans report
• July 29: First practice at the Miller Electric Center, with 10 sessions open to fans over the summer

The Backfield Belongs to Bhayshul Tuten (Probably)

The most consequential roster change of the offseason was subtraction: Travis Etienne left for New Orleans in free agency, taking with him the 260 carries that dwarfed Tuten's 83 a year ago. Coen has spent the summer all but shoving the job into Tuten's hands, publicly urging the second-year back to embrace the lead role, and Tuten has said the right things about cleaning up the details of his game. The competition behind him is real but compromised — free-agent addition Chris Rodriguez Jr. is still working back from foot surgery — so the runway is clear. In a Coen offense that feeds a featured back, Tuten is the popular breakout pick league-wide, and camp is where he either grabs the volume or invites the front office to keep shopping.

Trevor Lawrence and the Offense, Year Two Under Coen

It's easy to forget how thoroughly Lawrence answered his doubters in 2025: a franchise-record 38 total touchdowns, a 13-4 record, and the kind of December football Jacksonville hadn't seen in a generation. The spring reports were about refinement rather than repair — Coen praised Lawrence's ball security and downfield accuracy during the offseason program, and the connection with Thomas Jr. reportedly took another step. New offensive coordinator Grant Udinski, promoted after last season, inherits a unit whose remaining growth areas are the ones camp can actually fix: pre-snap operation, red-zone efficiency, and finding out whether the receiver room three-deep is playoff-caliber. If Hunter takes offensive snaps on top of that, this attack has another gear nobody's seen yet.

Life After Devin Lloyd, and Where the Defense Stands

The defense that carried the division title — a franchise-record 22 interceptions, Josh Hines-Allen breaking the career sack record, Cam Little casually drilling an NFL-record 68-yarder on the special teams side — lost one of its signature players when Devin Lloyd, he of the 99-yard pick-six, departed in free agency. Anthony Campanile's unit returns Foye Oluokun at one linebacker spot, and the battle to fill Lloyd's shoes is the defensive story of camp: Ventrell Miller is the incumbent favorite, with Branson Combs and seventh-round pick Parker Hughes pushing from below. Everywhere else the spine of a top-tier unit is intact, and if Hunter ends up playing serious corner snaps, the secondary could be better than last year's version. That's a scary sentence for the rest of the AFC South.

Where the Jaguars Stand After 2025

Zoom out for a second, because the context makes this camp different from any in recent memory. The 13-4 finish was Jacksonville's first double-digit win season since 2017 and its most victories since 1999, and it earned Coen a legitimate place in the Coach of the Year conversation in his first season on the job. The formula was unglamorous and repeatable: take the ball away, don't give it back, and let Lawrence play clean football. The wild-card exit against Buffalo stung precisely because it was close — a 27-24 home loss decided late — but it also stripped away any illusion about where the bar sits now. This roster wasn't built to win a division; it was built to win in January, and nearly everyone who mattered from that defense outside of Lloyd is back for another swing.

The Road Ahead: Two London Trips and a Loaded Start

The schedule-makers rewarded 13-4 with a gauntlet — seven games against 2025 playoff teams, and three division champions crossing the Jaguars' path inside the first five weeks. The calendar:

• Aug. 15: Preseason opener at New Orleans
• Aug. 21: Preseason vs. Carolina at EverBank Stadium
• Aug. 28: Preseason finale vs. Tampa Bay
• Sept. 13: Season opener vs. Cleveland at EverBank Stadium, 1 p.m. on CBS
• Sept. 27: New England visits in Week 3
• Oct. 11: "Home" game vs. Philadelphia at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, London
• Oct. 18: Houston at Wembley Stadium — back-to-back London games, then the Week 7 bye
• Nov. 5: Thursday night vs. Baltimore; Monday night vs. Pittsburgh follows Dec. 14, and Dallas visits in prime time Dec. 27

That's the week that was for the Jacksonville Jaguars: a superstar cleared, two linemen parked on PUP, a lead back anointed-in-waiting, and a champion's schedule waiting on the other side of August. The bar has moved. Last summer the question was whether Coen could drag this franchise back to relevance; he answered that with a division title and a home playoff game, even if Buffalo ended it 27-24 in the wild-card round. This summer the question is whether a healthy Hunter, a settled backfield and a year of scar tissue can turn 13-4 into something that survives January. Wednesday at the Miller Electric Center, they start finding out.