Travis Hunter has made two-way football look easy since college, but not everyone in Jacksonville is buying that it holds up over an NFL season. Jaguars legend Jimmy Smith recently backed NBA great Joe Johnson’s point that pro ball and college ball just aren’t the same beast and that the grind hits different once you’re in the league.
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“Good take Joe! I agree that it takes a minute,” Smith posted on X.
Shannon Sharpe, Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson, and Joe “Iso” Johnson got together this week to talk about Travis Hunter’s dream of playing both offense and defense in the NFL, and Joe Johnson wasn’t shy about where he stands.
“It’s such a huge difference, Unc,” Johnson said on the Nightcap Podcast, “because in college, yeah, you might have a guy or two on the team who may have a child, right? But in the pros, man, this is these dudes’ livelihood. You know what I mean?”
He didn’t stop there either.
“I think it’s a huge difference. See, in college, when you’re coming out of high school, you can go dominate college right away, man. When you come to the pros, bro, it takes a minute, man. Especially in football here, it takes a minute for you to really get going.”
That kind of skepticism matters here because of just how much the Jaguars gave up to get Hunter in the first place. They traded away four picks, two of them first-rounders, just to move up and grab him second overall last year. The whole bet was built around something almost nobody does anymore: playing both sides of the ball at a high level.
Hunter earned that reputation in college, splitting time at receiver and cornerback while putting together a Heisman-winning season in 2024. It was unusual then, and it’s even more unusual now that he’s trying to bring it to Sundays.
Jacksonville got its first real look at what that could mean during his rookie year. Through seven games, he logged 324 of 489 offensive snaps, good for 67% of the team’s offensive workload, while also playing 162 snaps on defense, or 36% of the defensive snaps, racking up 15 tackles and three pass breakups before a knee injury cut his season short.
Team officials have made it clear this isn’t a one-season experiment. GM James Gladstone said back in May that Hunter is “set to play both sides of the ball,” and expects his cornerback reps to grow in 2026. Head coach Liam Coen has echoed that same plan.
So far this season, the early numbers suggest defense is winning out. Hunter returned in Week 1 against the Browns and played just four offensive snaps compared to 29 at corner in a blowout win. Against the Broncos, the gap widened even more. He picked up seven snaps on offense but wasn’t targeted a single time, while his defensive workload jumped to 37 snaps.
Two games into the season, the pattern is hard to miss. Jacksonville seems to be leaning on Hunter primarily as a cornerback, with offense treated more like a bonus for now, even if Coen hasn’t ruled out expanding that role later.
“We’ll definitely have a package on offense to be able to get him some opportunities. There’s been a steady increase in his defensive work just by nature of where we’re at on defense and continuing to try to create consistency… There’s been a lot of detail and time-on-task this offseason. He’ll absolutely have a plan on offense,” Coen said on The Rich Eisen Show this month.
And Joe Johnson isn’t the first voice to question whether Hunter can really pull this off in the NFL. Shannon Sharpe raised the same doubts last year.
“I don’t think he realizes how many 100-snap games in the NFL,” Sharpe said on Nightcap in 2025. “People don’t realize that. There’s a difference between college and the NFL.”
Whether Hunter can actually make good on his goal of playing full time on both sides remains to be seen.