Tyler Warren Camp Update — August 16: The Jones Connection Is Live Again
2026 NFL Season · Monday, Aug 17
Three catches from Daniel Jones on one two-minute drive against New England's starting defense, including a deep ball the team site called picture-perfect. The connection the whole season rests on is back in live work.
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Tyler Warren caught three passes from Daniel Jones on a single two-minute drive against New England's first-team defense on Tuesday, one of them what the Colts.com training camp notebook called a picture-perfect deep ball toward the sideline, and the last of them carrying Indianapolis to the New England five-yard line before Josh Downs finished the drive. The team site's headline said it outright: Daniel Jones and Tyler Warren shine as the joint practice ends on a high note.
That is the exact sentence our June preview was waiting for. The argument then was that Warren's rookie season hid a much better player. With Jones throwing, he caught 60 balls for 699 yards across 13 games and produced like one of the five best tight ends in football; when the backups took over for the final month, the bottom fell out. So the bet was never a year-two leap. The bet was the quarterback's Achilles, because the target role — a hundred-plus-target pace as a rookie — was already the stickiest kind of thing a tight end can own.
This week put that bet back on the board. Jones's first live-rush work since the surgery ran through Warren, in a scripted-pressure situation, against another team's starters, and the ball found him three times. The preseason game itself told you nothing about Warren by design: per the Colts.com recap, only two projected starters played in Thursday's 13-13 tie, and it was Will Mallory who led the team with six catches for 80 yards while the varsity watched.
Does the June read hold? CONFIRMED — the with-Jones version of Tyler Warren is the real one, and the with-Jones version just showed up in the first live test. The usual August honesty applies: one two-minute drill is a data point, not a season, and the touchdown column we said should climb has not been tested yet.
Next week has a real checkpoint: joint practices against Atlanta on August 19 and 20 at Grand Park, then the Falcons game on August 22. Watch whether Warren keeps drawing the first read from Jones in team periods, and whether the red-zone work starts finding him. We'll check next Sunday.
_Data via nflverse._
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