The Buzz
Is Real

Is Travis Hunter wearing teal? Is the Santa Clara electrical substation haunted? Are the Vikings seriously considering going with J.J. McCarthy over Kyler Murray? It's camp season, baby. Every year we get storylines. In this report we backtested the camp buzz over eight years, and we're tracking everything going on through the month of August.

The whole thing started with a text. My buddy Glen, 2:29 on a Saturday afternoon.

It's a great question because everyone in your league already trades on this signal without knowing its value. Somebody drafted Puka Nacua in August 2023 because a beat writer wrote "glowing reviews since the beginning of OTAs." Somebody else ignored it. One of them won the league. The question is which one was playing the odds right.

Let's put the camp buzz to the test.

01 Why camp buzz is worth measuring at all

02 What we actually did

We collected 95 camp-window articles from 2018 through 2025, the stuff written in late July and August while practice was actually happening: NFL.com camp reports, CBS and SI stock watches, PFF risers, FantasyPros trackers, WalterFootball's camp diaries. The live 2026 pipeline also reads Establish The Run, Underdog Fantasy, and beat-writer tweets via X. From those articles we pulled 690 player mentions, each tagged with the exact language ("turning heads," "standing out," "popping," "tough day," "falling behind") and a sentiment direction.

Then we matched every mention to real season outcomes, and to the full population of players who did not get any buzz. The question we are trying to answer is whether camp buzz helps predict in-season success, and you can only answer that against the players nobody wrote about.

03 The headline number

Take the non-projected starters. The backups, the day-3 rookies, the journeymen, the post-hype guys. About 6,400 of them across eight seasons. Then split them by August coverage.

Sixteen percent doesn't sound like much until you price the alternative. A quiet deep-roster guy hits about once in 77 tries. A buzzy one hits once in six. In a 12-team league, the difference between those two odds, applied to your last three bench spots, is roughly the difference between streaming waivers all year and rostering Sam LaPorta in the 14th round.

The strangest thing the study turned up is that most of the signal is just attention. Whether the coverage was good or bad mattered far less than whether anybody wrote about the player at all.

Players catching negative camp coverage hit at 13.4% when they weren't projected starters, ten times the rate of players with no coverage at all. The mechanism is mundane: writers cover live position battles, so a backup taking "tough day" criticism is a backup standing close enough to a job to be criticized. Marlon Mack, Rachaad White, and Travis Etienne in 2025 all delivered startable seasons in years when camp reporters were doubting them. A limitation to flag here: the cohort is built by a rules-based filter, and a few names it treats as non-starters would have looked like starters to any human in August. The strict cohort in the next section ejects those cases. One more caution before you read "no coverage" as doom: in this study that label means absent from the 95 articles we collected, not absent from every beat report in America. The limitations section takes that seriously.

04 Eight for eight

A 13x lift built on one magical season would be a trivia answer, not a strategy. So here is the year-by-year. The chart uses the strict cohort, which is the harder test of the two we ran. On top of dropping everyone we could call a projected starter from pre-camp information, it also drops veterans who finished startable in any of the three previous seasons. That controls for the comeback story: a spreadsheet thinks a guy who missed all of last year is a nobody, and you don't. The full cohort, with those veterans left in, is one tap below the chart.

Buzz beats silence in every season under both definitions. The size of the gap swings a lot, from single digits in the leanest years to the mid-thirties in 2023's LaPorta-Nacua-Kyren bonanza, so it is a rate you play across a lot of picks rather than a read on any one guy.

The year-by-year receipts behind this chart, every mention from 2018 to 2025, are in the archive at the bottom of the page.

05 Isn't this just high drafted rookies winning a starting job?

That was our first objection too. It's why round-1 rookies were excluded from the cohort up front, and it's why the next chart exists. Split the cohort by pedigree and run the comparison inside each group.

Draft capital definitely matters. But when we control for it, the rookies who get talked about outperform the ones who don't. And, interestingly, veterans who were not startable the year before and then pick up buzz also outperform the veterans without it, even after we control for the guys coming back from injury. That's probably all we have to say here.

The one dead zone: undrafted free agents. UDFA camp heroes went 0-for-8. Jake Kumerow, "practices like a pro," source: Aaron Rodgers, is the patron saint of that group, and the reason "coach loves an UDFA" should move your heart and not your queue.

Bonus finding for the pessimists. Flip the whole study around and look at projected starters catching negative August coverage. They busted 79% of the time, against 61% for starters with quiet camps, a gap far too consistent across 1,200 starter-seasons to be noise. The “tough day” keyword works. It just works on the guys you drafted in round four, not the ones you're stashing in round fourteen.

06 The watchlist, right now

Here's the part you can use tonight. Same filter, applied live: non-projected starters generating positive buzz one week into 2026 camp, coverage through August 1. History's rate card says about three of these eighteen finish startable. History also says one week of practice reports is the noisy early read, and it's already claimed a victim: Chris Brazzell II popped in Carolina's first week, then tore his LCL. This list wants a late-August refresh before you draft on it, and we keep adding to it as more reports come in. We have a lot more sources feeding the pipeline now, so expect it to grow, and to get sorted by how strong the buzz is as the sample fills out.

07 Into the weeds

For anyone who wants a deeper dive into the data science behind this, here is the full breakdown, limitations included. One thing worth saying out loud: this study was made possible by the sentiment analysis you get out of Claude. The new LLM tooling makes it much easier to take a big pile of text and run a real historical study on it. Refining that process is going to be worth a lot, and it is the kind of work I want to do more of on The Side Quest.

08 Sources & data

Outcomes, rosters, snap counts, and draft data from nflverse. Editing discipline borrowed from Peter Yang's no-ai-slop. Full mention-level dataset with verbatim quotes and URLs available alongside this article.

09 The archive: 2018–2025, wire by wire

Every historical mention from the study, year by year, newest first. These are the receipts behind the numbers up top. Tap a year to open it; inside, “Team by team” collects each club’s buzz with how the season actually ended. Same note as the live wire: these items aggregate headlines, so the nuance inside the articles is probably missed. Back up to the 2026 Camp Wire ↑