The word out of Jacksonville this week is that Travis Hunter's offensive role is about to expand against New England, and if you have watched this team try to solve the Hunter puzzle since draft night, that sentence carries some weight. The Jaguars did not trade up to the second pick in the 2025 draft to use a Heisman winner as a situational piece. They did it because they believed they were getting two players in one body. Now they have to actually spend him.
That is the part nobody says out loud. Every extra rep at receiver is a rep he is not taking at corner, and Hunter is good enough at both that whichever side he leaves gets a little worse. Jacksonville has spent the front half of this season managing that trade, rotating him, protecting the workload, trying to keep a young player upright over a seventeen game grind. Deciding to lean him toward offense against the Patriots is a choice with a cost attached. Coaches make those choices when they think they need points.
I don't have his full snap split in front of me this morning, so I'm not going to pretend to know exactly where the dial has been set. What I do know is what the tape of him at Colorado said: he is at his most dangerous when he is the first read, not the change of pace. Route tree, alignment variety, motion, the stuff that takes practice reps. You can't run it for a guy who spends half of Wednesday in the defensive backs meeting.
Checked the almanac: Chuck Bednarik was the last true full-time two-way player in the NFL, and that was the Eagles in 1960. Sixty-six years is a long time for a job description to sit empty. Deion Sanders flirted with it. Nobody has held it.
What I'm watching is simple and it isn't the receiving line. It's the defensive personnel. If Jacksonville is comfortable playing a corner rotation without him for long stretches against New England, the offensive role is real and it is permanent. If he keeps sprinting back to the boundary on third downs, this is a package, not a promotion.