The mileage has always been one of the broad daylight fears with Travis Hunter.
The 2,625 snaps in two years at Colorado. The relentless redlining energy while starting at both wideout and cornerback. The nonchalance from those who surrounded and advocated for him throughout the NFL Draft process — constantly preaching that if anyone can play both ways in the NFL, it’s Travis Hunter. And then came the Oct. 30 practice with the Jacksonville Jaguars, when the LCL in Hunter’s right knee gave out in a non-contact injury.
Naturally, many minds went straight to one question: Was this a fluke, or his body finally breaking after a historic amount of usage over the past two years?
Then came Tuesday, with word that Hunter’s knee needed a surgical repair that would end his rookie season at seven games. It’s a reality that now begs another set of questions: Is this when the two-way experiment ends? And if not after this knee injury, when?
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Those questions are going to ride shotgun with the Jaguars throughout this coming offseason. Right alongside constant measurements about the haul of assets that were surrendered to move up to select Hunter with the second pick in the draft. Those assessments will hang on every medical update, then hit home in the most tangible way possible when the Cleveland Browns are on the clock with the Jaguars’ 2026 first-round draft pick.
In truth, Hunter’s knee injury is going to mean a lot of things for the Jaguars — things that we can see immediately, and things that are still obscured by football unknowns. But for now, it won’t mean abandoning the very reason the Jaguars traded so many pieces to get their hands on Hunter: Because they believed he could be a special two-way player who could give the franchise an edge that no other team in the NFL had.
That’s one of the things that I think many people misunderstand about the Jaguars’ long-term plans with Hunter. It’s often looked at two-dimensionally, with the assumption that Jacksonville was simply reaching for a player who could impact both sides of the ball at a high level. But it wasn’t just that. The Jaguars braintrust was reaching for mastery over unpredictability. And with that unpredictability would come more difficulty for opponents when it came to game-planning and preparation.
When I went through the Jaguars’ training camp back in August, the thought process inside the building was of using Hunter as a chess piece that moved in all directions — but most importantly, moved in ways that suited what the Jaguars needed from week to week. In the pie-in-the-sky plans, Hunter’s usage was imagined as being all over the map. In one game, he could play 90 percent of his snaps at wideout and 10 percent at cornerback. In the next game, that ratio could be flipped. Some games his energy could be spent entirely on offense … or defense. On a Super Bowl Sunday, when there is no game to be played one week later, he might play nearly all the snaps on offense and defense.
The point for the Jaguars, if this all came to fruition, was to offer opposing teams a preparation dilemma where they really had no clue where, when and how much Hunter could impact a game. And along the way, Jacksonville would be constructing a playbook for a two-way player who could — if history allowed it — be replicated in future years with future players capable of playing both offense and defense.
This is why one non-contact knee injury won’t end the Travis Hunter two-way experiment. It’s still too important for the franchise to surrender after the first big setback. And the Jaguars knew there could be moments like this along the way. When I spent time with general manager James Gladstone, he expected there would be moments of success and failure. And also that a piano could fall out of a second story window and land squarely on their plans. Which is exactly what happened on Oct. 30.
Not only that, it came at a time when it felt like Hunter was on the doorstep of a breakout as a wide receiver — with his role expected to be ramped up on that side of the ball pushing into November. Instead, he’s gone for the rest of this season, losing critical reps on offense and defense … losing hundreds and hundreds of game reps that would have helped him acclimate to both the NFL’s speed and the complexity of Jacksonville’s schemes.
That’s the first place this hurts, for both Jacksonville and Hunter. With wideout Brian Thomas Jr. dropping balls and looking like he was a better vertical fit in the previous regime’s scheme, the Jaguars needed Hunter to ascend to their No. 1 receiver spot. Had Hunter been able to accomplish that, it likely would have solidified how this growth was going to be achieved. First with a hard push into mastering the offensive side of the ball, then with a steady easing into the defensive scheme with the kind of situational use that gave him time to balance both worlds.
Now Hunter will effectively be rebooting his rookie year from an on-field perspective, spending his time on mental reps and focusing his energy on rehabbing rather than refining. Meanwhile, the Jaguars’ coaching staff and front office will be left to ponder … and ponder … and ponder: Where does this go from here?
On one hand, Hunter’s knee injury could have been worse. Many players have suffered LCL tears and come back to look like they never suffered a knee injury at all. Kansas City Chiefs wideout Rashee Rice is showcasing that before our very eyes, looking like a high-end No. 1 receiver in his last three games — which are his first since suffering a torn LCL last season.
But there’s still a flip side here when it comes to Hunter. Rice and other players who tore their LCLs weren’t coming off an unprecedented amount of usage on their bodies during their final two seasons in college. They also weren’t trying to master positions on offense or defense, or lift dreams of eventually being a two-way starting player in the NFL. Hunter is still in the category, even after this injury, and now things have changed.
In a way, a scoreboard is now hanging overhead. This is his first significant lower body injury and it ended his first season. If something like this happens again — or even if it’s lingering injuries that cost a few games here or there — that scoreboard is going to start tallying the accumulated numbers. And eventually, some questions are going to get asked loudly and repeatedly: What is the line here? How long will this go? And who is going to make that call?
For now, it’s just a bad break — a fluke injury that sometimes can happen to players. Not enough to completely derail grandiose plans that were just starting to show dividends. But that bad break came much earlier than anyone could have anticipated. And now it has once again conjured the broad daylight fears that Hunter isn’t just battling to master offense and defense, he’s also fighting to stay healthy long enough to make that happen.
