2025 NFL season: One player to root for from each NFC team

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With NFL training camps set to open next month, Tom Blair and Dan Parr provide a look at 32 players — one from each team — to root for in the upcoming season.

Tom provides his NFC selections below. Click here for Dan’s AFC picks.

Campbell seems sincerely happy to be back where he began his NFL career 17 years ago, and that’s genuinely sweet. But he’s not some washed veteran taking a symbolic victory lap in his old uniform colors — as Campbell put it recently, he feels he “can still ball.” The league’s active leader in tackles for loss (187, which ranks third all time) has a chance to make an actual difference for a team teetering on the brink of legitimate contention, potentially giving Jonathan Gannon’s defense the kind of extra juice (and leadership) it needs to push Arizona over the hump. Of course, even if everything I just typed was stripped away, Campbell would still be worth cheering on simply for lacing ’em up to start his 18th NFL season as a defensive lineman six days after turning 39 . We should not sleep on what he’s accomplishing; if Campbell compiles at least five sacks (as he’s done the past three seasons), he would be just the third player to reach that total at his age since 2000, joining Reggie White (2000) and Bruce Smith (2002 and 2003).

OK, so Pitts has definitely not lived up to his draft status, averaging less than 40 receiving yards per game over the past three seasons — but there’s something that strikes me as a little unfair about writing him off as a complete bust at this point. How many tight ends could meet the expectations that come with being picked fourth overall, especially for an organization that decides to spend much of the next few years wandering the QB wilderness? The last time Pitts worked with a reliably competent signal-caller, catching passes from Matt Ryan as a rookie in 2021, he finished with 1,026 receiving yards, 24th-most in the league. I will admit that the further we get from that season, the less likely it looks that Pitts will turn it around — but I’m also always pulling for struggling top picks to put it all together. Maybe with a full season of    Michael Penix Jr.    under center, Pitts can get into a legitimate groove and help the Falcons compete, or at least secure a stronger market for his services elsewhere.

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