NFL training camps are opening up this week, marking the end of the offseason and the beginning of the real preparation for the on-field play to come in 2023. After months of writing about player acquisitions and talking about quotes in the media, I'm excited to finally break down real football and preview what will actually happen between the lines this upcoming season.
Next week, that is. I'm excited to do that next week, because I have one more extremely hypothetical piece about the 2022 season left in me. I was looking back to last year and some of the biggest moves each team made, and it got me thinking: What would have happened if things had gone just slightly differently? I thought of three situations in which a player was traveling on a road with two forks and had to choose one. What if he had gone down the other path?
I love a good "what-if" or alternate timeline scenario, if only because it shows us how dramatic the tiniest ripple can be when it comes to impacting what happens during an NFL season. A few years ago, I put one together to exhibit how NFL history would have changed if three scenarios surrounding Drew Brees had played out slightly differently. Today, I'm going to do the same thing for three trades or free agent signings from the 2022 season: Allen Robinson II's signing, Christian McCaffrey's trade and Tyreek Hill's trade.
Now, there's a creative amount of artistic license here. When possible, I've tried to use some semblance of how players actually performed in a given week and translated it to another team. That's probably ridiculous. I've also tried to use reporting on what coaches and GMs were willing to do at the time to fill in trade packages and potential draft picks. Given that these are hypotheticals, there's no guarantee they would have played out the same way in real life. Each scenario also doesn't touch the other, so whatever didn't happen in real life that appears in the first hypothetical didn't happen in hypotheticals two and three.
The three places from which these scenarios emanate, though, are steeped in reality. Starting with those paths diverging and using what we know about the 2022 season to figure out what might have happened next introduces new playoff teams, changes the course of multiple franchises and potentially even changes the final result of the Super Bowl. And that all starts, naturally, with a wide receiver who is being paid $10 million to play somewhere else in 2023.
Jump to scenario:
Eagles sign WR Robinson
Rams land RB McCaffrey
Jets trade for WR Hill
