Free agent running back Najee Harris visited the Raiders on Friday, according to the NFL’s transactions report.
He previously visited the Seahawks.
Ashton Jeanty, a first-round pick in 2025, is the Raiders’ starting running back, with Dylan Laube and Chris Collier also on the roster.
Harris is working his way back from a torn Achilles. He was injured in a Sept. 21 game against the Broncos while playing for the Chargers.
Harris, who signed with the Chargers as a free agent last March, landed on the non-football injury list ahead of last summer’s training camp after a fireworks accident. He missed all the Chargers’ training camp practices but returned for the beginning of the season.
The 2021 first-round pick spent his first four seasons with the Steelers and ran for 4,312 yards during his time in Pittsburgh.
Offseason programs will start getting underway around the NFL next week.
The ten teams that hired new coaches this offseason will be eligible to start working with their players on Monday, April 6. The Ravens are the only team that has set that as their first day of work while the Cardinals, Falcons, Bills, Browns, Raiders, Dolphins, Giants, Steelers and Titans have set Tuesday as their opening day.
All of those teams will also be able to hold a voluntary minicamp later in the spring. Every team is also scheduled to hold a rookie minicamp and a mandatory minicamp over the course of the next few months.
The first two weeks of work for all teams is limited to meetings, strength and conditioning, and physical rehabilitation only. The three-week second phase allows for on-field work, but no full-speed team drills while the third OTA phase allows for team drills, but there is no live contact allowed at any point in the offseason.
Most of the 22 teams with returning coaches will be opening their offseason programs on April 20 or 21. The Broncos have set May 4 as their first day.
The Bengals are adding to their secondary.
Cincinnati has reached a one-year agreement with safety Kyle Dugger, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reports.
Dugger, 30, spent the second half of last season with the Steelers, starting nine games after being traded from the Patriots. He tallied 42 total tackles with five passes defensed and two interceptions.
A second-round pick in 2020, Dugger spent his first five-plus seasons with New England. He’s appeared in 90 career games with 78 starts, recording 11 interceptions with 29 passes defensed.
Acrisure Stadium, which opened as Heinz Field in 2001, has been characterized by an endless ocean of yellow seats. That finally will be changing.
Via Chris Adamski of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Steelers owner Art Rooney II said that black seats are being installed in the upper deck of the venue.
“We were making changes to the seating,” Rooney said. “The sea of gold sometimes gets overwhelming, so we did a little black and gold in there this time around.”
Rooney said it will be a “random pattern.” The practical impact will be to deaden the retina-searing impact of empty seats in the facility, which happens when the place clears out early during a Steelers game or throughout a Pitt home game.
It’s a smart move, albeit long overdue. The bright yellow was too much. Sprinkling in black seats will make the visual impact far less jarring.
Five years ago, then-Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers hijacked (perhaps not intentionally) the draft-day news cycle with word that the 49ers nearly traded for him. It prompted speculation throughout round one of the 2021 draft that a trade could happen, with the Broncos emerging as a potential candidate.
It didn’t happen, obviously. Rodgers, the 2020 NFL MVP, won the 2021 NFL MVP award before spending one more year in Green Bay.
Now, with (to date) only the Steelers linked to Rodgers during the 2026 free-agency cycle, Denver has potentially re-entered the chat.
There’s talk of the Broncos possibly bringing Rodgers in for a visit. The motivation comes from the possibility that current starter Bo Nix won’t be fully and completely back to 100 percent when Week 1 rolls around.
This notion conflicts with recent comments from Broncos owner Greg Penner, who declared at the NFL’s annual meeting that Nix is “ahead of schedule” from the broken ankle he suffered late in the playoff win over the Bills and should be good to go for OTAs.
Beyond the basic question of whether Nix will be healthy is whether Nix gives the Broncos the best chance to get to the Super Bowl and win it. Coach Sean Payton, who like any coach who has won a Super Bowl with one team is keenly aware that no coach has won a Super Bowl with two different franchises, may be tempted to roll the dice on a possible one-year upgrade (if Rodgers would truly be an upgrade) in order to finish the work the Broncos started in 2025.
For Payton, the possibility of blazing a new trail for NFL coaches could be the thing that gets him to Canton. If he thinks Rodgers gives them a better chance to win the Super Bowl than Nix, why wouldn’t Payton at least ponder the possibility?
From Rodgers’s perspective, which team gives him a better chance to walk away with a second Lombardi Trophy in his back pocket, the Steelers or the Broncos?
It’s all very early. And it’s not an April Fool’s Day gag. The Broncos could be turning to Rodgers, at a time when the Steelers have assumed the position for the second straight offseason.
If — and for now it’s a big if — Rodgers ends up in Denver, he wouldn’t play the Packers (unless the two teams meet in the Super Bowl, for the first time since the 1997 season). But he would make visits to the Jets, the Steelers, and one more trip to San Francisco, the team he wanted to draft him in 2005 and the team that tried to trade for him in 2021.
