Ponder wants to meet Favre as he progresses as a QB

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The Vikings are still trying to figure out whether Christian Ponder can be a franchise-level quarterback.

Toward the end, Ponder wants to meet the lsat guy the Vikings had who met that description.

Ponder told Alex Marvez of FOXSports.com he was trying to arrange a meeting this offseason with Brett Favre, to pick his brain for help taking the next step in his own development.

“We’re going to bring that up and try to take advantage of that,” Ponder said.

After trying and coming close with a quarterback on the downside of his career, the Vikings went the opposite route in drafting Ponder and trusting him with the job as a rookie, after it became obvious Donovan McNabb had nothing left.

He’s played a mostly efficient style, and the Vikings haven’t asked too much of him, but he’s nearing the point where he’s either going to take a step or not. Tomorrow’s game against the Packers is going to be a good gauge of where he stands in the process.

“You talk about litmus tests,” Frazier said. “This will be one going on the road in Green Bay against a high-powered offense that we need to match at times. This will be a gauge for [Ponder] as to where he is in his career.”

Walking in as the starter on a team that was already 1-5 last year tempered expectations, but he’s got them 6-5 this season, and on the fringes of the playoffs.

“He’s coming along,” cornerback Antoine Winfield said of Ponder. “The coaches are working with him. But it’s a process. You don’t expect him to come in and be All-World.

“He’s going to make some mistakes and go through some growing pains. But I think he’ll be a better player because of it.”

Whether he ever gets to Favre’s level remains to be seen.

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After signing with the Titans in 2013, Delanie Walker has become arguably the best tight end in franchise history. He’s set franchise records and provided a consistent receiving options for the various Titans quarterbacks over that span.

However, Walker thinks Jonnu Smith, drafted in the third-round by Tennessee in May, will eventually be better than him for the franchise.

“One day he will be better than me,” Walker said of Smith, via Jason Wolf of the USA Today. “And that’s his ultimate goal. And if he didn’t feel that way, I wouldn’t want him here.”

If Walker’s proclamation is correct, Smith will have built quite a career for himself with the Titans. Walker holds single-season receiving records for Tennessee in both receptions and yards. In four years with the Titans, Walker has amassed 282 catches for 3,349 yards and 23 touchdowns. His best season came in 2015 with 94 catches for 1,088 yards and six touchdowns in Marcus Mariota’s rookie campaign.

It’s a high bar to clear. However, Walker has been impressed by what he’s seen so far.

“I think he’s a great guy,” Walker said. “I think he sits back, he don’t talk much, he learns. He’s respectful. If I ask him to do something, he does it.

“I think he’s going to go a long way and be a star in this league.”

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Because the University of Washington runs on a quarter system that didn’t get out until June, new Arizona Cardinals safety Budda Baker was unable to take part in most of the team’s offseason program.

However, Baker feels he’s as prepared as he can be for the start of training camp given the circumstances.

In an interview with Bertrand Berry and Mike Jurecki on Arizona Sports 98.7-FM, Baker said he frequently spoke with Cardinals’ safeties coach Nick Rapone and watched as much film as he could from afar.

“For me, I always try to watch film, watch film of the practices,” Baker said. “So I feel like I’m not really that far behind.

“The only thing I haven’t done is really taken the reps with the whole team; the rookies have done seven-on-seven and all that type of stuff, so I’ve been able to run the plays consistently during seven-on-seven so now it’s just a matter of doing it at camp.”

Baker was able to participate in the team’s rookie mini-camp soon after the draft, but the rest of the offseason was pretty much a wash. The benefit is that Baker said the system he’s jumping into with the Cardinals is very similar to the defense he played in at Washington. The only significant change to Baker is some differing terminology.

Baker is looking forward to training camp and preseason games to give him the chance to learn on the field and show what he can do in the lead up to the regular season.

“So for these preseason games, I know the rookies get a lot of reps, so get as much reps as I can. I like to think of it as these preseason games are like my OTAs and mini-camp that I missed,” Baker said. “Just getting all these reps, taking as much reps as I can — whether it’s defense or special teams — and ultimately competing. That’s my goal.”

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After the Giants defense made a massive leap from 2015 to last year, defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo finally feels like he’s back in a comfort zone in New York.

According to Paul Schwartz of the New York Post, Spagnuolo believes he has a handle on the personnel and an understanding of how the team fits together after returning to the team two years ago.

“Listen, the first year I was here in 2015, I didn’t really know what we had, (Jason Pierre-Paul) had the (fireworks) accident,” Spagnuolo said. “Last year, we really didn’t know, because we brought in a lot of new people. This is the first year in the three years I’ve been here you feel comfortable, where there’s a comfort level in knowing what we are, who we are, guys working with each other, players with players, coaches with coaches, coaches with players. So there’s a comfort level there. It doesn’t guarantee success but I think if we stay healthy we’ll be ok.”

The Giants were last in the league in total defense and ranked 30th in points per game allowed in Spanguolo’s first season back in 2015. The leap last year was substantial as the Giants improved to 10th in total defense and second in points allowed.

The improvement helped the Giants return to the playoffs for just the second time since Spagnuolo left the team following the 2008 season to become the head coach of the St. Louis Rams.

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With just a month left before training camps open, Denver Broncos running back Jamaal Charles is starting to feel like himself again.

In an interview with Troy Renck of the Denver Channel, Charles says he’s resumed cutting on surgically repaired knees and is getting closer to full strength.

“I am doing everything,” Charles said. “I have been cutting the last couple of days with the guys during the offseason workouts. I feel like the way I am cutting that I am back to the normal me, man. It feels good to be moving around again,”

Charles had surgery on both knees last year as he worked back from an ACL injury that ended his 2015 season. He appeared in just three games with Kansas City last year before landing on injured reserve. He rushed for just 40 yards on 12 carries with a touchdown before his season came to an end.

He was limited in work this offseason with an eye toward being ready for training camp. Charles still feels like he has plenty of good football remaining.

“I have been knowing this the whole offseason (that the knee was fine),” he said. “Nobody can take nothing away from me except God when my time is up. I am still 30 years old. I still have a lot of special stuff to do.”

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Well, that didn’t take long.

Tim Tebow lived up to the hype for one night, homering in his fourth at-bat with St. Lucie after the High Single-A affiliate promoted him. Tebow followed that two-run blast in the second inning with a single in the fourth. It came in the second game of a doubleheader Wednesday.

Tebow’s debut for the St. Lucie Mets was scheduled for Tuesday but rain postponed it to Wednesday when the Mets and Palm Beach Cardinals played a doubleheader. The former Heisman Trophy winner singled up the middle in the fifth inning of Game 1, going 1-for-2 with a walk and a strike out as the Mets won 5-2.

Critics questioned why the Mets promoted Tebow when his.220 batting average with the low-A Columbia (S.C.) Fireflies was higher than only 10 other players in the entire league. Tebow also struck out 69 times in 64 games against low-A pitching.

Tebow, 29, homered in his first career minor league at-bat with the Fireflies in April.

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A month later, Victor Cruz has toned down his conspiracy theory comments about his former team.

Cruz, back in New Jersey for his Victor Cruz Foundation Football Exhibition and Skills Challenge, backed down from earlier allegations the Giants purposely kept the ball from him to make it easier to cut him. The Giants have denied Cruz’s claims.

“I don’t know what their plans [were],” Cruz said Wednesday, via Howie Kussoy of the New York Post. “I don’t know what they think about upstairs.

“I haven’t had any conversations with anyone. Everyone’s underway with their programs. . . . No one has time to handle issues and for me to call, and all those things. Just turn the page and move on.”

Cruz, 30, was scheduled to make $7.5 million in salary and bonuses this season and count $9.4 million against the Giants’ salary cap. He made only 39 receptions for 586 yards and one touchdown in 15 games last season and played only six games combined in 2014-15 because of injuries. He signed a one-year deal with the Bears worth up to $4 million.

“Even after a Super Bowl, or after an injury-riddled two years, I always feel like I’ve got something to prove because I do,” Cruz said. “You’re only as good as your last catch, your last game, your last year of production. That’s what they categorize you as, whatever you’ve last shown on that field.

“I’m excited for that opportunity.”

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Dak Prescott won 13 games and offensive rookie of the year honors last season. The Cowboys quarterback doesn’t consider that a victory, though.

The Cowboys, despite having home-field advantage throughout the NFC playoffs, lost to the Packers in the divisional round. The franchise has not reached the NFC Championship Game since the 1995 season, when Prescott was only 2 years old.

“It wasn’t a win,” Prescott told Mike Florio on PFT Live on Wednesday. “To me, a season is only qualified as a win if you win that last game. That’s what the Patriots were. They were the one winners of this past season. For me, it was a good start. For the team, it was a good start with young guys coming in, but it’s not where we want to be. We want to be playing in that last game of the season. We know what it takes to get there, and that’s what we’ve done this offseason is work our tails off to try to put ourselves in that position.”

Tony Romo ended his 14-year career with most of the team’s all-time passing records, but the criticism that dogs him is his inability to get the Cowboys a Super Bowl title. Romo went 78-49 in the regular season but only 2-4 in the post season. A franchise with two Super Bowl-winning, Hall-of-Fame quarterbacks in Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman places great expectations on the shoulder of its signal caller.

Prescott embraces those expectations, seconding the notion that quarterbacks should be judged by titles.

“Winning games and winning those playoff games and winning championship games,” Prescott said. “. . . At the end of the day, you can break as many records as you want; you win a lot of games at the quarterback position, throw for a lot of yards. It honestly means nothing if you don’t have a championship, if you don’t bring home a championship. It’s tough. It’s nothing easy about that. It’s not easy to do that by any means, but at the end of the day, I feel like that’s what the quarterback is judged on is how many championships did he win and how many times did he give his team chances to win those big-time games.”

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The Packers have gone back to 1996 when they ranked first in points per game with tight ends Keith Jackson and Mark Chmura a big part of their offense. Jackson and Chmura combined for 68 receptions for 875 yards and 10 touchdowns that season.

This season, the Packers plan on the same after signing Martellus Bennett and Lance Kendricks, who combined for 160 targets, 105 receptions and nine touchdowns last season. The newcomers join veteran tight end Richard Rodgers, giving the Packers all kinds of options at the position.

“I think what it does is it gives us some more flexibility to run two tight end sets,” Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers said, via Rob Reischel of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Both guys can put their hand on the ground and go and block guys really well but also add that dimension in the passing game.”

Bennett has averaged 63.6 receptions, 5.2 touchdowns and 728.2 yards per season the past five seasons. Kendricks made 50 catches last season, and Rodgers had 30.

With Jordy Nelson, Davante Adams and Randall Cobb, the Packers’ biggest problem might come in keeping all their weapons involved.

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What do David Irving, Demarcus Lawrence and Randy Gregory have in common? They are Cowboys defensive ends who have faced NFL suspensions the past year.

A team in need of pass rushers can’t keep its pass rushers on the field.

The three defensive ends will miss a minimum of 38 combined games because of suspension, with Gregory serving 30 games of that.

The NFL first suspended Gregory for a violation of the NFL’s substance abuse policy during the 2015 season. Before Gregory even could serve the four-game suspension to start the 2016 season, he earned another 10 games for missing a test. Gregory played the final two games of last season while appealing at least a year-long suspension, but his appeal was denied, and he isn’t eligible to return until at least January.

On June 30, 2016, the league suspended Lawrence for the first four games of the 2016 season for violating the NFL’s substance abuse policy.

Now, it’s Irving, who will miss four games for an over-the-counter performance enhancing drug banned by the NFL.

The Cowboys, who had 36 sacks last season, could use all three. They haven’t ranked in the top 10 in sacks since 2011. They haven’t had a double-digit sack leader since defensive tackle Jason Hatcher made 11 in 2013.

The Cowboys took chances on Lawrence and Gregory with second-round picks in back-to-back drafts despite both having red flags. Lawrence showed promise in 2015 with eight sacks but took a step back last season with only one in nine games. Between Gregory’s injuries and suspensions, the Cowboys still don’t know what they have in him and may never know.

The Cowboys signed Irving, who also had red flags after being dismissed from Iowa State, off Kansas City’s practice squad in 2015. He was their best pass-rusher last season, with four sacks, a team-best 26 quarterback pressures and four forced fumbles. Now, he will have his progress interrupted.

With a revolving door at the position, and a lack of a war daddy pass-rusher since DeMarcus Ware left, it’s no wonder the Cowboys haven’t had a consistent pass rush. Giving Aaron Rodgers too much time cost them in their last two playoff losses over the past three seasons, so the Cowboys’ chances of getting where they want to go hinge on getting to the quarterback.

At the risk of being more immodest than usual (if that’s even possible), there’s only one place where your NFL news and information is periodically augmented with a dash of legal education. And as it relates to the Supreme Court’s decision to explore whether federal law banning the expansion of sports wagering by the various states violates the U.S. Constitution, there’s one specific area of that one place where you can get a length explanation of what it all means, and where it’s all going.

It’s in the Wednesday PFT Live non-vacation vacation edition podcast, which devotes more than 10 minutes to explaining and exploring every angle of the situation.

But there’s also plenty more, along with a review of the news of the day relating to among other things three fairly recent No. 1 overall picks in the draft.

The podcast is available at Apple Podcasts, audioBoom, and/or wherever else you can get the PFT Live podcast. Subscribe at  Apple Podcasts, audioBoom, and/or wherever else you can get the PFT Live podcast.

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Former 49ers coach Chip Kelly says Colin Kaepernick was everything he wanted in a franchise quarterback last season.

Kelly said on Adam Schefter’s podcast that Kaepernick was as hard a worker as he could have asked for in their one season together.

“He came to work every day, extremely diligent in terms of his preparation, in terms of his work ethic,” Kelly said, via All22.com. “I really enjoyed Kap. I’ve talked to Kap three or four times since. I think he’s a really good player and a really good person, and I really enjoyed coaching him.

As for talk that Kaepernick’s decision to kneel for the national anthem serving as a distraction in San Francisco, Kelly said that was never the case.

“He explained to all the players his thought process and mindset of what he was doing,” Kelly said. “And there were some players that agreed with him and some players that didn’t agree with him. But after that point, we heard from the outside about what a distraction it is, except those people weren’t in our locker room and it never was a distraction. [Kaepernick] never turned it into a circus or whatever people think.”

Kelly and former 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh have both spoken out vocally in favor of some team giving Kaepernick a chance. So far, no team has.

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The NFL has suspended free agent running back Karlos Williams for at least one year, according to Field Yates of ESPN.

Williams played for the Bills in 2015, rushing for 517 yards and seven touchdowns. The league suspended Williams for the first four games of the 2016 season for a substance-abuse policy violation, and the Bills released him Aug. 21.

Williams joined the Steelers’ practice squad Oct. 12, but in November, the NFL suspended Williams for 10 games.

He had served all but two games of his 10-game suspension, and remains a free agent after the Steelers waived him in March.

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The regular radio version and NBCSN simulcast of PFT Live are on hiatus for the next few weeks, but we’re still doing regular podcasts to fill the time before everything gets back to normal next month.

Wednesday’s edition of the podcast is a good one thanks to a visit from Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott. Prescott joined Mike Florio to discuss what was missing from his rookie season, his relationship with Ezekiel Elliott, his expectations for the coming year and his work with the “Ready. Raise. Rise.” campaign to raise awareness of Immuno-Oncology research and support those battling cancer.

The full video of Prescott’s visit appears here. The interview also will be included in Thursday’s PFT Live podcast, which will be available for free at Apple Podcasts, audioBoom, and wherever else you can get the PFT Live podcast.

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In May, there was a report that the Cowboys will be without defensive end David Irving for the first four games of the regular season because of a suspension but there was no official word from the team about the ban.

That word came on Wednesday. The league has announced that Irving has been suspended for a violation of the league’s performance-enhancing drug policy.

Irving will be eligible to return to the team after they play the Rams on October 1. He can participate in practices and preseason games before his suspension starts during the week leading up to their season opener.

Irving had four sacks and four forced fumbles while coming off the bench in 13 of his 15 appearances for the team last season. The Cowboys will roll with Demarcus Lawrence, Charles Tapper, Tyrone Crawford and first-round pick Taco Charlton at end until Irving is eligible to return to the team.

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Darius Slay was an alternate for the Pro Bowl last season. The four players selected ahead of the Lions cornerback — Janoris Jenkins, Patrick Peterson, Richard Sherman and Xavier Rhodes — all had more interceptions.

Slay had only two interceptions, just as he had the year before and the year before that. His rookie season, when he had no picks, was the only season Slay didn’t have two interceptions.

“When the opportunity presents itself, if it presents itself only five times a year, make those five,” Lions cornerbacks coach Tony Oden said, via Dave Birkett of the Detroit Free Press. “He’s doing a good job out here catching extra balls, so he’s doing his part. So those things will come. Those things will come.”

Slay’s forced turnovers did come at opportune times last season: He forced a Ryan Mathews fourth-quarter fumble that led to Matt Prater’s go-ahead field goal against the Eagles, and then intercepted Carson Wentz to ice it on the next series; he intercepted Sam Bradford with 30 seconds left on Thanksgiving to set up Prater’s game-winner against the Vikings.

Oden expects Slay to earn recognition among the best in the league at his position this season, but Slay likely needs more than two interceptions to get Pro Bowl honors.