Many have been concerned with the immediate future of Travis Hunter , but James Gladstone calmed those down.
After a stunning 13-win season that finished with a loss to the Buffalo Bills in the playoffs, the Jacksonville Jaguars were in an interesting spot. They had multiple different things go wrong during the playoff game, and the biggest one was arguably not having Travis Hunter available.
He injured his knee midway through his first season and didn't play in the playoffs. The good news for the Jaguars is that Hunter will be ready to go at the start of the season. The biggest question moving forward was how much Hunter would play on both sides of the football.
The biggest aspect of the discussion has been weighing on the minds of fantasy football managers. How much will he play on offense? Initial reports were that Hunter was going to play more at cornerback, but James Gladstone cleared up what that meant on The Rich Eisen Show .
"He is set to play both sides of the ball. The the piece that I think we can expect to see is actually an uptick in in corner usage. Right last year it was a higher volume, higher percentage of wide receiver usage than it was corner. I think we can expect to see that corner percentile and count go up as we move forward. That's not to say anything impacts his availability and usage on offense. It just means that that cornerback usage will increase.'
The nuance of the comments is what's important here. Gladstone didn't say that he was going to play less at wide receiver, just the percentage of plays would be going down. That's an important distinction, because he only played 162 of his 488 plays at cornerback last year.
What Gladstone said highlights what we all thought should have happened right away: the split will be much closer to 50/50. Considering his elite instincts at cornerback, it makes a lot of sense to play him more on defense.
Being able to play heavily on both sides of the football is important for Hunter, especially since the Jaguars traded a ton of assets to get him in the 2025 NFL Draft. Only time will tell if that will be the case, but Gladstone seemed to have cleared things up with Hunter's future.
