Why You Should Ignore Everything You Saw at Minicamp (And Everything You Heard About It Too)

Listen, I love minicamp. I really do. There is something special about those early June days when the grass is still green, the sun is shining, and every team in America believes they have just discovered the secret formula that is going to carry them all the way to February glory. The problem is that minicamp has about as much predictive value as a fortune cookie, and I am not sure fortune cookies are even trying that hard anymore.

Every single year, without fail, we get the same movie playing out with different actors. A receiver makes three or four catches in shorts and a t-shirt against third-string cornerbacks who are one bad game away from being car salesmen, and suddenly he is the next great thing in football. A running back breaks one run for sixty yards in a situation where nobody is really hitting anybody and we start measuring his Hall of Fame jacket. A young quarterback throws a few completions in a controlled environment where the biggest threat to his safety is getting hit in the helmet with an air horn, and people start comparing him to Tom Brady like he just won the Super Bowl in his first year.

Here is the thing about football that people sometimes forget: it is hard. Really hard. Not hard like calculus or learning to play the cello. Hard like trying to block a guy who is faster, stronger, and meaner than you are while you are running a play you have only known about for a few weeks. Hard like throwing a football to a spot on the field while a three hundred pound man is running at your face with nothing but bad intentions. Hard like making the right read with seven voices screaming at you and fourteen eyes trying to figure out what you are about to do before you do it.

Minicamp is about as close to actual football as a swimsuit model is to a construction worker. Sure, they both look good standing still, but one of them is not prepared for the job that is about to be done. At minicamp, there are no pads. There are no forty game schedules wearing down your body. There is no crowd noise making it impossible to hear the quarterback. There is no fear of getting hurt that changes how you play. There is no adversity, no comebacks needed, no fourth quarter moments where everything on the line and you have to find something extra inside yourself that you did not even know was there.

Take Tre Harris and the Chargers situation. Now look, Harris might be a tremendous football player. I am not sitting here telling you that. What I am telling you is that looking great running routes against cornerbacks who are fighting for a roster spot and a paycheck is not the same as looking great against Patrick Mahomes' defense where everybody is playing for keeps. The Chargers have been excited about a lot of young receivers over the years, and some of them have been good and some of them have been invisible. The difference between the two is not usually what happens in June. It is what happens in September, October, and November when real football is being played.

I remember watching Donovan McNabb at minicamp one year absolutely shred the Eagles defense in 7-on-7 drills. The guy was just hitting everything, showing touch, showing accuracy, showing poise. I told myself right then that he was going to have a great year. Guess what? He did. But that is not how it usually goes. Most of the time, the best performer in June is somebody you have never heard of. By October, he is back in arena league or working at a bank. That is just how it is.

The comparison game at minicamp is even worse. Somebody sees a young quarterback throw well for a few days and suddenly he is the next Joe Montana or Peyton Manning or whoever. I have seen this happen hundreds of times. A coach or a scout gets excited and says something to a reporter about what a young player reminds him of, and before you know it, that comparison is being made in national headlines like it is some kind of statistical fact. The 2026 Bengals being compared to the 2019 LSU Tigers is just the latest example of this kind of thinking.

Here is what actually matters with the Bengals: Do they have Joe Burrow healthy and hungry? Do they have a defense that can keep them in football games? Do they have the kind of running game that allows their offense to be more than just Burrow slinging it around? Do they have enough time in the pocket and enough weapons to take advantage of that time? Those are the things that made that LSU team special. Not because Burrow had a great week of practice in the spring. Because they had all the pieces working together when the games counted.

What minicamp is actually good for is giving you a window into how teams are thinking. If a team is spending a lot of time developing a young receiver or giving a backup quarterback a lot of reps, that tells you something about their confidence level or their concerns about depth. If a coach is working a lot on a certain scheme or a certain package, you can learn something about where their head is at for the coming season. That is valuable information, but it is different from actually being able to predict whether something is going to work.

The thing that makes minicamp so seductive is that it looks exactly like football. The field is the same size. The routes are the same routes. The plays are the same plays. But everything else is different. The speed of the game is different because there is no real defense being played. The intensity is different because there are no real consequences. The physical toll is different because nobody is really hitting. The mental load is different because the game is simplified and slowed down.

I have always believed that you should look at minicamp like you look at a car with one wheel up on the lift at a mechanic shop. You can see what is going on underneath, and maybe you can learn something about what kind of work needs to be done. But you cannot drive the car yet. You cannot really know if all the parts are going to work together until you get it on the road and put some miles on it.

What fans should actually care about is the trajectory of teams over the course of a season. Does a player who looks good in June still look good in August and September? Does a young receiver who is open all the time at minicamp learn how to get open against someone who is actually trying to cover him? Does a backup quarterback who throws well in shorts prove he can get a defense from the sideline and diagnose what is happening in real time?

These are the questions that matter. Not what happened when the pads were off and the stakes were nothing. The real test of whether the Bengals are building something special is how they play in playoff games, not how Joe Burrow looks in June. The real test of whether Tre Harris is going to be a great receiver is whether he can separate from cornerbacks who are trying to knock his head off, not whether he can run clean routes in shorts.

So enjoy minicamp. Watch the video clips. Read the reports. Get excited about the possibilities. That is part of what makes being a football fan so great. The hope and the optimism and the feeling that this could be the year everything comes together for your team. Just remember that nothing has been settled yet. Nothing has been proven. Everything is still in the realm of potential, and potential is a wonderful thing, but it is not the same as actually doing it on Sunday.