‘Quarterback’ Season 3 is the perfect lead-in to NFL training camps
‘Quarterback’ Season 3 is the perfect lead-in to NFL training camps
The unscripted Netflix series is the title I’m most excited to watch this week.
Every NFL fan knows the excruciating wait between seasons that ensues every year. Summer is always the worst, specifically because of its proximity to the new season. At the end of July, every NFL team convenes for training camp to begin preparing for their upcoming campaign, giving fans their first true glimpse of what the year might be like.
But at this point in the calendar, we simply have to keep waiting. As a giant football fan, I know that patience is easy to preach and hard to practice while the days of summer creep by, which is why I’m so excited for the third season of the Netflix documentary series “Quarterback,” which premieres on Tuesday, July 14.
The third season of Netflix’s “Quarterback” will follow a chosen quartet of signal-callers as they try to survive the gauntlet that is an NFL season. This year, the show will follow the 2025 seasons of Tennessee Titans quarterback Cam Ward, Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Flacco, Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield, and Washington Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels.
There are a couple of intriguing dualities I’m looking forward to exploring in the new season of “Quarterback.” First is the contrasting journeys of Jayden Daniels and Cam Ward; Ward, the first overall pick of the 2025 NFL Draft, enters his season full of promise, hoping to follow in the footsteps of Daniels by leading a team that no one expected much from to success in his first year.
Daniels himself, meanwhile, feels the full weight of those expectations going into his second year. And, as anyone who watched the Commanders’ season last year knows, those expectations came crashing down amidst a year of nagging injuries for Daniels and a weak defense. Seeing the two young quarterbacks take different paths over the course of the year will be intriguing to watch.
The contrast of Mayfield and Flacco is no less intriguing. Both have tried to find success for themselves away from the teams that they first made their names with, and though Flacco is admittedly in a much later stage of his career, I’m excited to see how “Quarterback” digs into the family lives of these men who have had to move around so much to extend their careers.
“Quarterback” has always done an excellent job of humanizing NFL signal callers — far more so than I think a show like “Hard Knocks” has done. The series makes a true effort to show NFL quarterbacks as more than just football machines, but what I’ve been most surprised by is how revealing it is when it comes to explaining to viewers just how difficult the life of an NFL QB is. It’s not just Xs and Os, either; it’s the knowledge that, fair or not, fan expectations for the team’s success will fall on them more than any other individual on the team.
The wait for the NFL season to come around again has been a long one, but “Quarterback” Season 3 will make it a little easier to close out the remaining time until training camps begin. All episodes of Season 3 will become available to stream for all Netflix subscribers on Tuesday, July 14.
Netflix
Netflix is a leading subscription-based video streaming service that offers on-demand access to an extensive library of over 3,000 movies, 2,000+ TV shows, and a growing collection of acclaimed Netflix originals. Renowned for producing groundbreaking content, Netflix has become a cultural powerhouse with hit originals like “Stranger Things,” “Wednesday,” “Squid Game,” “The Crown,” “Tiger King,” “Bridgerton,” “The Witcher,” and “Black Mirror.”