“Practice Is for Practicing”: J.J. Watt Calls the Serious Reporting of Training Camp “Insane and Ridiculous”

By July 22 and 23, all 32 NFL teams had their veterans report to training camp. Of course, that doesn’t include the handful of players still holding out. But for everyone else, football is officially back, or at least the closest thing to it.

With the regular season still almost two months away, this is the time when the real work begins. Players are fighting for depth chart spots, battling for positions, trying to avoid the cut list, and making their case in crowded QB rooms (like in Cleveland). This is the time when teams start shaping their identity.

However, J.J. Watt wants everyone to pump the brakes on one thing: taking training camp stats seriously. He’s had enough of fans, as well as the media, treating these numbers like they actually matter.

After the first day of veterans reporting to training camp, Watt took to social media to express how he once thought everyone only jokingly analyzed camp stats. But that wasn’t the case, he sadly found out.

So, he tells those people that they have no idea what training camps are actually for. It’s for practice … Every session could have a different aim or goal, and no one could say what it is from the outside. Some plays can be skewed to the defense’s advantage, some to the offense’s. It’s all part of practice, learning from mistakes and not repeating them in the regular season.

“Training Camp ‘stats’ are insane and ridiculous… Practice is for practicing. You’re supposed to fail. You’re supposed to try new things, see what works and what doesn’t work, etc. If you only do what works, you’ll never grow, adapt, [or] change,” he penned.

Here’s the full tweet:

It’s hard to argue against Watt, as that would be underestimating someone who played the game for 12 years at the highest level. Three Defensive Player of the Year nods and five First-Team All-Pro selections should also be enough on a resume to say that he knows what he’s talking about.

However, for players fighting for a spot on the 53-man roster, including rookies and vets coming back from an injury, stats tell us fans how they’re doing. It gets us excited, too, like how Jayden Daniels started showing out around the same time last year. And then, he led the Commanders to an NFC title game after 33 years.

Stats are exciting, and while we know there’s no way to say if training camp stats can clearly indicate how a player will perform in preseason games or the regular season, they can at least show us how far that player has come and if there’s any potential.

Stats also pinpoint negatives, and ignoring those negatives can be risky, to say the least. It’s like how former LB Will Compton pointed out under Watt’s post that if the interception by undrafted rookie Chase Minnifield off Kirk Cousins (which is also a stat) had been taken seriously in 2013, the QB might not have gone on to make $290 million in his career. But he did … and with a 1-3 postseason record over 13 years.

Cousins caught a stray out of nowhere, but Compton makes a good point. Training camp stats shouldn’t be treated as gospel, but they are important. What do you think?