Jakobi Meyers Camp Update — August 31: The Brace Became a Cast

The hand got worse, and nothing in the reporting since says it got better. Jakobi Meyers, who a week ago was practicing in a brace, was in a cast and unavailable for Tuesday's joint practice with Tampa Bay, per Carlos Sanchez at Black and Teal — with Riley Orovitz at WRUF corroborating the same day and specifying the right hand, injured back in the joint practice with Carolina. And the file did not close by cut day: writing Sunday, Sanchez still had Meyers dealing with the injury — he calls it an arm injury in that piece, where the Tuesday reports said hand — and raised the scenario of him being unavailable for the opener. No team designation exists — the league's injury-report machinery has not started — so that reporting is the attributable ceiling. No source has said whether he will or will not play Week One.

The roster part was never in doubt. Meyers made the 53, per John Shipley at Jaguar Report, and John Oehser's breakdown at the team's website places him in the receivers' core trio. He sat Friday's finale with the rest of the front-liners. But the reps he could not take Tuesday went somewhere: in his absence the rookies Josh Cameron and CJ Williams had gotten plenty of them, per Sanchez, and Parker Washington was tentatively the number-one target that day. The room behind the top three was then cut to those same two rookies at the deadline.

Our last episode asked whether the hand brace would come with missed practice before the cutdown, and the answer was yes, more emphatically than the question anticipated: brace to cast, present to unavailable. The second question — whether Meyers keeps the first red-zone look once the room is healthy — got no answer, because the room was never healthy: Meyers in a cast, Brian Thomas nursing a shoulder, Washington just returning. There is no red-zone practice reporting on Meyers in this window at all. For anyone new to the file: five straight seasons of at least 96 targets, a December extension, and a camp in which the red-zone connections with Trevor Lawrence kept arriving — until the file went dark because he did. Last week we wrote that a receiver's hand is not a place to carry hardware quietly into September. That instinct now looks right. We'll report where the hand stands as the Cleveland game draws near.

_Data via nflverse._