Joe Theismann Previews NFL’s Top Storylines with Training Camps on the Horizon

Joe Theismann has watched enough football to know that a quarterback's leap rarely happens by accident. So when he looked ahead at the coming NFL season, he started where the conversation kept pointing, in Chicago, with Caleb Williams.

"I think he had a heck of a year last year, but it shows you the impact of a coach and it shows the impact of growth in a year," Theismann said on the show. He praised Williams as extremely talented, a player who could run around and make plays late in his rookie year, and he drew a pointed comparison to a team that took the same jump. "The Chicago Bears at the end of last season looked an awful lot like the Washington Commanders the year before."

For Theismann, the quarterback position is a process, and he saw Williams grow into it. "We saw him get better and better and better as the year went on. He got the ball out of his hands more, didn't have to run around as much." With the discipline he credited to head coach Ben Johnson and another year in the system, Theismann expects Williams to be "quite good" on what he called a really good football team in a tough division.

From there Theismann moved through the storylines he cannot wait to see. He flagged the Arizona Cardinals and their No. 1 pick, Jeremiah Love out of Notre Dame, and wondered whether Jacoby Brissett can do what the job requires. He called Kyler Murray's move to Minnesota one of the most intriguing situations in the league. "He's not the biggest guy in the world. Throwing the ball in the middle of the football field is not easy," Theismann said, noting that Murray made a living in Arizona running for his life. In Pittsburgh, he pointed to Mike McCarthy and Aaron Rodgers being "married back up together" and wondered what they can build.

Then there is the churn at the top. Theismann marveled that a third of the league has new head coaches, ten of them, with three in the AFC North alone. He argued the title itself is almost a misnomer. "The term head coach really doesn't apply. I think you're a head administrator," he said, because the real key is the assistants a coach hires and whether they can deliver the message across offense, defense and special teams.

No preview was complete without the Los Angeles Rams, and Theismann sounded convinced. He pointed to Myles Garrett joining a team that already sat at the doorstep, calling him a force who logged 23 sacks last season on a defense that produced around 45. "The Rams are going to be tough to beat," he said, right down to the fact that they could be playing a home game at Super Bowl 61.

He would not let anyone overlook defense, either. Theismann reminded the show that the last two champions were driven by it, the Eagles two years ago and Seattle this past year, and told an old story to make the point. In Super Bowl 17, when his Washington team beat Miami, opposing quarterback David Woodley "went 0 for 17 in the second half," Theismann said, a stat he offered to be fact-checked on. Defense, in other words, still travels.