AFC Notes: Justin Hebert, Jimmy Garoppolo, Broncos, Chargers, Raiders

Broncos

Broncos WR Tim Patrick revealed in an interview with the team website that he is fully cleared after tearing his ACL in 2022.

“At this point, I’m cleared to do everything,” Patrick said, via DenverBroncos.com. “At this point, I’m just doing repetition to get myself ready to play in a game.”

Chargers

Chargers GM Tom Telesco believes that the team can win the Super Bowl with QB Justin Herbert and is currently negotiating an extension with him.

“I don’t have an update on it,” Telesco told SiriusXM NFL Radio on the negotiations. “There’s a lot that will go into it, obviously, with these types of contracts and the amount of numbers that it’s going to be. It’s just a good problem to have to know you have a franchise quarterback that’s now moving into a veteran franchise quarterback. There are a lot of good things that come with that. Now, the flip side is, we’ll build the team a little bit differently. We’ll transition to that in the next couple of years. I’m not losing a lot of sleep over it. Yeah, I know the numbers are going to be big. He’s earned it, but we think we can win a Super Bowl with him. That’s a good problem to have. We’ll get it done at some point, and then we’ll go from there.”

Raiders

Raiders GM Dave Ziegler tells Tashan Reed of TheAthletic.com that QB Jimmy Garoppolo is a “proven leader, proven winner” who has success when healthy. 

“Simply put: Proven leader, proven winner,” Ziegler said. “I think he’s won 70 percent of his starts. And you can caveat that with the whys and all that stuff but, at the end of the day, he was a part of winning a lot of football games. He’s a proven leader. He’s a proven winner, and the next part of that is obviously he’s been steeped in the offensive system that we run. And so, there’s an advantage in that, too. Simply put, that’s what it was.”

While it appeared as though the deal between the Raiders and Garoppolo could be delayed at one point, Ziegler says they “never had any concern” the deal would get done.

“It was just things contractually like language and stuff like that that we had to work through,” Ziegler said. “There was zero worry at any point. We knew it was going to get done. It was just making sure that everything — there’s a lot of protection and clauses and language and things like that — so it just took a little bit longer once we all sat down and started to go through the contract. Because you talk about the framework, obviously, before, but when we actually were kind of going the nuts and the bolts of it, there was just a couple things that took a little bit longer to work through than we anticipated.”