Keon Coleman Camp Update — August 23: A Walking Boot Clouds Week One
2026 NFL Season · Sunday, Aug 23
Keon Coleman spent the week in a walking boot on his right foot — a sprained foot, per NFL Network's Cameron Wolfe, that will cost him practice time and puts the September 13 opener in question. He missed every practice this window, including Thursday's joint session in Berea.
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Keon Coleman spent this week in a walking boot. 13WHAM's Dan Fetes spotted it on his right foot at Tuesday's practice, and NFL Network's Cameron Wolfe reported the injury from the Carolina game as a sprained foot that will cost Coleman practice time, with his availability for the September 13 opener against Houston now an open question. The counterweights in Wolfe's reporting: practice video showed Coleman moving reasonably well despite the boot, and head coach Joe Brady has expressed little concern about severity. But the calendar did what the quotes could not — Coleman missed Tuesday's practice, per ESPN's Alaina Getzenberg, was still out for Thursday's joint session in Berea, per John Green at Bills On SI, and obviously did not play Saturday in Cleveland. Brady's word on the medical picture has not advanced past the weekend's "we'll see what the medical ends up looking like."
The timing is the problem more than the diagnosis. The June preview framed Coleman's season as a fork built on one question — how much of a role DJ Moore's arrival leaves him — and said the camp pecking order in August was where that gets decided. Last week's answer was encouraging: a scramble-drill touchdown from Josh Allen with Moore and Khalil Shakir on the field. This week's answer is that you cannot contest a pecking order from a walking boot, and the fight is not paused around him. The tight ends caught four touchdowns from Allen in the Berea joint practice, per the team site, and Moore returned to full practice with no missed time, per Joe Buscaglia of The Athletic. The one oddly leveling development: Shakir spent the back half of the week off the practice field himself with an undisclosed issue, so the three-receiver hierarchy Coleman is fighting inside is, for the moment, mostly a medical chart.
What to watch next: the boot, simply — whether Coleman is back on a practice field before rosters cut to 53 on Sunday, August 30, and any firmer word on Week One than a coach declining to diagnose. We'll check after cut day.
_Data via nflverse._
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