NFL OTAs Explained: Offseason Workouts and Minicamp
NFL OTAs explained under the league's labor deal with the NFLPA: three offseason phases, ten no-pads practices, the mandatory minicamp and the fines.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished NFL Season & Playoffs26 min read
- Length of the offseason program
- 9 weeks
- Phases
- 3
- OTA days per team
- 10
- Mandatory veteran minicamps
- 1
For ten days each spring an NFL team is allowed to put its offense on a practice field against its defense. Helmets on, no pads, no tackling, two hours at most. Those ten days are OTAs, short for organized team activities, and they are the last and busiest part of a nine-week offseason program that every club in the National Football League runs between mid-April and the middle of June.
They are also voluntary. Article 21 of the collective bargaining agreement between the league and the NFL Players Association says so in its first sentence, and no team can fine a player for staying home. The one exception in the whole spring is a three-day mandatory minicamp, held in the same stretch and governed by a separate article. Everything else a fan hears about in May, the "phases" and the veteran who has not reported, follows from those two facts: the practices are tightly limited, and almost none of them can be required.
What OTA stands for and what one actually is
The labor agreement's own phrase is "organized team practice activity," with "OTAs" and "OTA days" given as the short forms. Coaches and reporters say organized team activities. It is the same thing.
An OTA is a practice. That sounds too obvious to need saying, but most of the offseason program is not practice in any sense a fan would recognize. It is weightlifting, running, meetings and drills run against air. An OTA day is the point at which a team finally looks like a team: eleven on offense, eleven on defense, a play called in the huddle, the ball snapped.
It still does not look like September. Players wear helmets, jerseys and shorts. Nobody is tackled, nobody is blocked to the ground, and a defender who arrives at the quarterback pulls up and runs past. The tempo is quick but the collisions are missing, which is why line coaches tend to shrug at spring practice and quarterback coaches love it.
The sessions are crowded. A club carries up to 90 players in the spring, so the work is split among first, second and third units taking turns, and the periods are short. A common shape is individual drills by position, then a seven-on-seven passing period, then several blocks of eleven-on-eleven with special teams in between. Nobody keeps score.
- 9Weeks in the offseason program
- 3Phases
- 10OTA days allowed per club
- 1Mandatory veteran minicamps
Limits set by Articles 21 and 22 of the 2020 collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and the NFLPA.
The word gets used loosely. Fans say "OTAs" to mean the entire spring, and a headline that a player "skipped OTAs" may refer to a weightlifting session in April that was never an OTA at all. The distinction matters for what a team can do about an absence, and it matters to the count: only ten days in the whole program carry the name.
One more thing an OTA is not. It is not open. Only some sessions can be watched by reporters, and the footage that reaches the public is a few minutes of individual drills. The full practice is filmed, though, for a reason that has nothing to do with coaching and is explained further down.
The nine-week offseason program, phase by phase
Start with what a team cannot do. From the end of its season until its program officially opens, a club may not run a supervised workout, hold a meeting between a coach and a player about football, or go over the playbook with anyone. Players can use the weight room on their own, with strength coaches present to keep them from hurting themselves. That is all.
The program itself is nine weeks, and the agreement divides it into three phases of increasing freedom.
- Phase One, two weeksStrength, conditioning and rehabilitation only. Strength coaches are the only coaches allowed on the field, and footballs are barred with narrow exceptions.
- Phase Two, three weeksEvery coach may be on the field. Individual and group drills are allowed, with offense and defense working separately. No helmets.
- Phase Three, four weeksTen OTA days and the mandatory minicamp. Offense may face defense in team drills, in helmets, with no live contact.
The structure set by Article 21 of the 2020 collective bargaining agreement. Workouts are limited to four days a week, with none on weekends.
Phase One: two weeks without a football
The first two weeks belong to the strength and conditioning staff. The head coach, the coordinators and the position coaches are not allowed on the field and may not even watch. The agreement calls what happens "dead ball" activity, and it means it nearly literally: footballs are banned, with a short list of exceptions. Quarterbacks may throw to receivers so long as nobody is covering them. Kickers, punters and long snappers may work with a ball. Returners may field kicks with no coverage running at them, and anyone may catch passes fired from a machine.
No helmets, either. Phase One is a return to training after two or three months away, and the rules are written to keep it from turning into anything more.
Phase Two: three weeks of drills against air
In the next three weeks the full coaching staff comes out. Position groups run individual drills. An offense may run its plays against no defense, what the agreement calls "perfect play" drills, and a defense may line up against empty grass.
The 2020 agreement allows one refinement. Offensive players may line up across from other offensive players, and defenders across from defenders, to run plays at a walk-through pace. The agreement's benchmark for that pace is "Pro Bowl practice pace," which tells you roughly how fast anyone is moving. Offense against defense is still forbidden. So are helmets.
Phase Three: four weeks, and the only real practice
The last four weeks hold everything fans think of as the spring: the ten OTA days and the mandatory minicamp. Helmets go on. The offense faces the defense in seven-on-seven, nine-on-seven and full eleven-on-eleven periods. Kicking teams may line up against return teams.
A team with a new head coach gets a small head start. It may open its program on the first Monday in April, two weeks ahead of everyone else, and spread its nine weeks over a longer window. All other clubs begin no earlier than the third Monday in April.
What is allowed on the field and what is banned
The simplest rule in the whole article is one sentence: contact work "is expressly prohibited in all offseason workouts." The agreement gives its examples in parentheses: live blocking, tackling, pass rushing, bump-and-run.
Everything else is a matter of which phase a team is in.
| Activity | Phase One | Phase Two | Phase Three and OTAs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Position coaches on the field | No | Yes | Yes |
| Helmets | No | No | Yes |
| Pads or padded shells | No | No | No |
| Offense or defense running plays against air | No | Yes | Yes |
| Team offense against team defense | No | No | Yes, without live contact |
| One-on-one drills, offense against defense | No | No | No, with one narrow exception |
| Live blocking, tackling or bump-and-run | No | No | No |
The row on equipment deserves a second look. "Helmets only" is the usual description, and the text goes further than that: no shells. Shells are the thin shoulder pads teams wear in light regular-season practices, and in the spring even those stay in the equipment room. Players may wear soft protective shirts that the league and union have jointly approved, along with knee and elbow pads.
The row on one-on-one drills is where the rule bites hardest. The drill every fan pictures from training camp, an offensive tackle setting up against an edge rusher with nobody else involved, is illegal in the spring. So is a receiver trying to beat press coverage from a cornerback who is allowed to jam him. The agreement lists both by name.
The narrow exception, written into the 2020 text, reads like something drafted by two sides that did not trust each other. Outside the 10-yard line, defensive backs may show press coverage using "hand placement (versus jamming)," provided the defender "does not impede the receiver or alter his route." A jointly approved video demonstrates what that looks like. In other words a cornerback may put a hand on a receiver so long as the hand does nothing.
An appendix to the agreement states the intended spirit more plainly than the article does. Offseason work is for "training, teaching and physical conditioning," and drills should not be run "at a level where one player is in a physical contest with another player."
That sentence explains why spring practice reveals so much about some positions and almost nothing about others. Quarterbacks, receivers and defensive backs can do most of their real jobs without contact. Linemen cannot do theirs at all. A rookie guard may look quick and assignment-sound for five weeks in shorts and still be unable to move anyone once the pads come on in August. Coaches know this, which is why honest ones call the spring a passing camp.
The count: ten OTA days, daily limits and who keeps track
Ten is the total. The agreement also says how the ten are spread: no more than three OTA days in each of the first two weeks of Phase Three, and no more than four in either the third week or the fourth. Whichever of those last two weeks does not hold four OTAs holds the mandatory minicamp instead. Three, three and four.
In a week with three OTA days, a club may add a fourth workout day, but that day reverts to Phase Two rules. No offense against defense, no helmets.
Then come the clocks.
On an ordinary day in Phases One and Two a player may be at the facility for four hours and on the field for 90 minutes. The club may dictate only two of those four hours; the player picks the other two himself, so that his lifting can fit around his own schedule. On an OTA day the limits rise to six hours in the building and two on the field.
The drafting is precise about when the field clock starts: when a coach begins coaching a player. Fifteen minutes of stretching with the strength staff before an OTA does not count. If weather stops an OTA inside its first hour, a team with an indoor facility has to move inside and finish that day; a team without one may reschedule, after the league has consulted the union.
Filmed, filed and inspected
Who checks any of this? The union does, and it has been given real tools.
Every club must send its offseason schedule to the league and the NFLPA at least 21 days before the program begins, with OTA days marked. Every on-field session in all three phases must be filmed, and the film kept until 30 days after the regular season starts. The union can ask for the video of any practice without filing a formal complaint, up to four clubs a week. It may also send representatives on unannounced visits, as many as eight per club in a league year, with access to the practice field and the locker room.
In practice the first check is the players themselves. A veteran who thinks a drill crossed the line can call his union representative that afternoon, and the film will show whether he was right.
Voluntary versus mandatory: why skipping OTAs cannot be fined
"Voluntary" in the NFL is usually said with a raised eyebrow. In this case the text backs it up.
Article 21 opens by stating that no player "shall be required to attend or participate in any offseason workout program or classroom instruction" other than the minicamp provided for in Article 22. Everything else "shall be strictly voluntary." The article then anticipates the obvious workaround. No club official may tell a player the workouts are not really voluntary, or suggest that skipping them will cost him his roster spot or bring "any other adverse consequences affecting his working conditions."
So a team has no stick. It cannot fine an absent player, and it cannot threaten him. A coach asked about a missing star in May will say the sessions are voluntary and that he would love to have everyone there, and that is close to the limit of what he is permitted to say.
What a team does have is a modest carrot. Players who take part are paid a daily amount fixed by the agreement, a few hundred dollars, and they must complete three of the four workouts scheduled in a week to collect it. For a rookie-minimum player on a 90-man spring roster that adds up to useful money. For a quarterback on a nine-figure contract it is a rounding error. Larger incentives exist, and they are private: the workout bonuses that agents and clubs negotiate into individual contracts, covered below.
Minicamp is different in kind. It is the one piece of the spring a club may compel, and the agreement puts a price on missing it.
There is a gray zone worth admitting. A player fighting for the fifty-third place on a roster is free to skip a voluntary practice in exactly the way an intern is free to skip the company picnic. Nobody will fine him. Somebody else will take his repetitions with the second team, and the coaches will form their opinions without him. The rule protects established veterans far better than it protects the people at the bottom of the depth chart, and everyone involved understands that. How the bottom of that depth chart is built is the subject of our page on how many players an NFL team carries.
The mandatory minicamp: three days and escalating fines
Each club may hold one mandatory minicamp for veterans each year. One. It runs for three days of practice, placed in the third or fourth week of Phase Three, and the agreement lays out the week: physical examinations on Monday with no practice, practices Tuesday through Thursday, Friday off.
The football is the same as at OTAs. No pads, no live contact, Phase Three rules throughout. What changes is the workload. A minicamp day may last ten hours at the facility, with up to three and a half on the field, and on two of the three days a team may practice twice. The second session is limited to a walk-through. Nothing may start before 7 a.m. or end after 8:30 p.m., and players must be given an hour each for lunch and dinner. That the agreement specifies mealtimes says something about the history of the relationship.
A player under contract who does not show up can be fined, and the amounts climb by the day.
| Day missed | Maximum fine, 2020 and 2021 league years |
|---|---|
| First day | $15,515 |
| Second day | $31,030 |
| Third day | $46,540 |
| All three days | $93,085 |
Those are the figures printed in the agreement for its first two years. The schedule rises in later years, so the current maximum for missing the whole camp is higher than the last row shows.
Two details are easy to miss. First, these are maximum fines. The club may impose less, or nothing, and teams in the middle of a friendly contract negotiation often excuse the absence or quietly waive the money. Training camp is not like that. For a player on a veteran contract who stays away from camp, the same agreement sets a fine of $50,000 a day in its early years, a figure its schedule raises later, and says in so many words that it is mandatory and may not be reduced or forgiven. Second, a fine requires a contract. A player who has been given the franchise tag and has not signed it is not under contract, cannot be fined for missing anything, and frequently does not appear until late summer. That dynamic is part of our explainer on how the franchise tag works.
The extra camp for a new head coach
A club that has hired a new head coach since the end of the previous regular season may hold a second minicamp for veterans. It is voluntary. It must take place before the draft, no earlier than the third week of the team's program, and it follows the same practice rules as the mandatory one. Combined with the early April start, it gives a new staff a few additional days to teach a playbook to players who have never heard its vocabulary.
Rookie minicamp: the weekend after the draft
Draft picks do not join the veterans straight away. Their introduction is a three-day rookie minicamp, which a club may hold on either the first or the second weekend after the draft.
Three groups take part. There are the players the team has just drafted. There are the undrafted free agents it signed in the hours after the draft ended, a process described in our guide to how undrafted free agents sign and stick. And there are tryout players: unsigned rookies invited for the weekend with no contract and no promise, hoping to leave with one. A team may also bring in up to five unsigned veterans on the same tryout basis, and may invite first-year players who signed with a club the previous season and have yet to establish themselves.
The tryout is the longest shot in professional football and it occasionally comes in. Adam Thielen attended Minnesota's rookie minicamp in 2013 on a tryout, earned a contract, spent a year on the practice squad and became a Pro Bowl receiver. Stories like his are rare. They are also the reason every club's rookie minicamp includes a group of players with no contract at all.
After that weekend, rookies enter what the agreement calls the Rookie Football Development Program. It runs for seven weeks from about the middle of May, five days a week, with as much as eight hours a day at the facility. No weekend work is allowed in it apart from the minicamp itself. The program is part football and part orientation, mixing playbook work with sessions on money and on life as a professional.
Rookies take part in the team's OTAs alongside the veterans once those begin, so for a few weeks a first-year player is in two programs at once. The spring is where most of them first discover the speed of the professional game. Even at a tempo with no contact, it is faster than anything they did in college, where spring ball means 15 practices, many of them in pads, capped by a public scrimmage of the kind covered in our piece on the college football spring game.
Why some veterans stay away and others never miss
Money, mostly, in both directions.
The standard inducement to attend is a workout bonus: a clause in a player's contract that pays a fixed sum if he takes part in the offseason program. The agreement regulates these for experienced players. For anyone with four or more accrued seasons, a club may not make the bonus depend on attending more than 84.375 percent of the workouts. The oddly exact figure is 27 of 32, and it means a veteran can miss five sessions and still be paid in full. For a player with such a clause, "voluntary" has a dollar figure attached, and it is one he agreed to.
The standard reason to stay away is also a contract. A player who wants a new deal has few ways to show displeasure that cost him nothing, and skipping voluntary work in May is the cheapest of them. He gives up his workout bonus, if he has one, and nothing else. Staying away from mandatory minicamp raises the stakes to fines. Staying away from training camp raises them to fines that cannot be waived, which is why the modern version of the tactic is the "hold-in," reporting on time and declining to practice. The full escalation is set out in our guide to NFL holdout rules.
Not every absence is a protest. A good number of established veterans train on their own because they believe, with some reason, that their private regimen suits a 32-year-old body better than a group session designed around rookies. Teams that trust those players generally say so.
Who actually gains from being there
It depends heavily on the job.
- Quarterbacks and their receivers gain the most. Timing on a route is built by repetition, and seven-on-seven periods without a pass rush are close to ideal for it.
- Players learning a new scheme gain almost as much. When a team has changed coordinators, the spring is where the terminology is taught, and a veteran who arrives in late July is learning it while everyone else is refining it.
- Offensive and defensive linemen gain least on the field, since the core of their work is banned until training camp. What they get is conditioning and classroom time.
- Running backs with heavy workloads are the players teams themselves are most relaxed about, on the theory that the carries are better saved for the fall.
There is a reasonable case that the importance of spring attendance is overstated every year, chiefly because May offers reporters so little else to cover. A star's absence from a voluntary practice is a story in a way that his presence at a mandatory one is not. Most of those stories end the same way, with the player on the field in September.
When a team breaks the rules: canceled practices, fines and Seattle's draft pick
In 2016 the NFL took a fifth-round draft pick from the Seattle Seahawks. The offense was not tampering or a salary-cap trick. It was too much contact in the club's no-pads offseason practices that spring.
It was not Seattle's first offense. The club had been penalized for excessive contact in its spring practices in 2012 and again in 2014, and by 2016 the league had run out of patience. Along with the 2017 draft choice, the team was fined $400,000 and head coach Pete Carroll was fined $200,000.
The agreement provides a schedule of penalties, and it aims them at the person with the whistle. The head coach and the club are "jointly responsible."
| Violation | Head coach | Club | Other penalties |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | $100,000 fine | $250,000 fine | The club's next scheduled week of OTAs is canceled |
| Second in the same league year | $250,000 fine | $500,000 fine | Another week of OTAs canceled, and a fourth-round draft pick forfeited |
| Failure to hand over practice film | None stated | None stated | The next week of OTAs is canceled automatically |
| Violation in the final week of the program | As above | As above | The first week of OTAs, three sessions, is lost the following spring |
The fine amounts are the 2020 figures. In each later year they move with the league's projected revenue, by no more than 10 percent a year. The commissioner may reduce them if a club acted on a good-faith reading of the rules or the breach was not material. Whatever is collected does not go to the league: half is donated to the Gene Upshaw Players Assistance Trust and half to the Player Care Foundation. A fined coach must pay it himself, since the agreement bars the club from reimbursing him.
Several of the smaller clauses show careful drafting. When a week of OTAs is canceled, players may not work out at the facility that week, but they are treated as having attended for the purpose of workout pay and bonuses, so the punishment lands on the team and not on them. A carried-over cancellation follows the coach: if he is fired and hired elsewhere as a head coach, his new club loses the week.
Notice that Seattle's penalty does not match the table. The agreement's draft-pick forfeiture is a fourth-round choice for two violations in one league year. Seattle lost a fifth-round choice for violations spread across several. That came from the commissioner's general disciplinary authority under the league's constitution, which the agreement's own schedule does not replace.
Seattle is the best-known case and not the only one. Baltimore lost a week of OTAs in 2016 after rookies were briefly put in pads at a minicamp, and in 2021, Urban Meyer's first spring as head coach, Jacksonville was fined and lost an OTA practice for excessive contact. The pattern in most of them is the same: competitive coaches, competitive players, a drill that got faster than the rules allow, and film that left no room for argument.
The calendar around it: a mid-April start, a summer dead period
The spring program sits in the quietest part of the league's year and is shaped by what surrounds it.
- January to MarchNo organized work with coaches is permitted. Players may train on their own, and free agency opens in mid-March.
- Early or mid-AprilThe offseason program begins: the first Monday in April for clubs with a new head coach, the third Monday for everyone else.
- Late AprilThe draft. A new coach's voluntary veteran minicamp must be held before it.
- MayRookie minicamp on the first or second weekend after the draft, then the rookie development program. Phase Three and OTAs begin late in the month.
- JuneThe last OTA days and the three-day mandatory minicamp, after which the program ends.
- Late June to late JulyThe dead period. No organized football activity with any coach is allowed until camp.
The typical order of the NFL offseason. Exact dates vary by club and by year, and each team files its own schedule with the league and the union.
The front end is defined by player movement. Rosters turn over in March, when contracts expire and free agency opens, and again in late April with the draft. The offseason program is the first time the new group is in a building together, and it is the largest group the club will have all year, nearly twice the number that will dress for a game in the fall.
The back end is defined by a ban. Once a club's program is over, the agreement prohibits any organized workout or football activity with a coach until training camp, "on either a voluntary or involuntary basis." This is the dead period, about five or six weeks from mid-June to late July. Players scatter. Quarterbacks commonly gather their receivers somewhere warm to throw, and those sessions are legal precisely because no coach is present and no club organized them.
Camp then opens on a date fixed by counting backward. Veterans other than quarterbacks and injured players report 47 days before their club's first regular-season game (48 for a Monday opener), which lands in the second half of July, and rookies may be called in up to a week earlier. Pads go on only after a five-day acclimation period. From there the calendar runs through three exhibition games, described in our explainer on the NFL preseason, and into the regular season after Labor Day.
Coaches have some discretion inside that frame. A club is not obliged to use all ten OTA days, and it is common for a head coach to cancel the last one or two, or to cut minicamp short, as a reward for a spring he thinks has gone well. The agreement sets maximums. It requires none of it.
Seen whole, the year has a clear rhythm: no contact from the last game until August. A veteran whose team misses the playoffs plays a game in early January and does not legally hit anyone again for nearly seven months.
How the spring got shorter: 14 weeks before 2011, nine since
None of this structure is old. Through the 2000s the offseason program could run for 14 weeks, a club could hold 14 OTAs, and the rules on what happened during them were a single page appended to the labor agreement. There were no phases. Coaches were on the field from the first day, and the main restrictions were the bans on pads and contact.
The 2011 lockout changed that. Owners locked the players out in March of that year and the dispute ran into late July, wiping out that spring's offseason program entirely. The agreement that ended it was, on the players' side, largely a trade of money for working conditions. They accepted a smaller share of revenue than they had been receiving. In return they got, among other things, a much lighter offseason:
- The program was cut from 14 weeks to nine.
- OTAs were cut from 14 to ten.
- The three-phase structure was created, with coaches kept off the field for the first two weeks.
- Two-a-day padded practices in training camp, a ritual of the sport for generations, were abolished.
The 2020 agreement kept that framework. Its text carries the walk-through periods in Phase Two, the hand-placement rule for press coverage, jointly approved protective shirts, and a right for the union to request practice film without first filing a complaint. Its weightier limits fall on training camp, where padded practices are capped at 16.
Then two unplanned experiments. In the spring of 2020 the pandemic closed team facilities and the entire offseason program was held by video conference. A year later, with facilities open again, the NFLPA advised its members to stay away from voluntary in-person work, and players on a large number of teams issued statements saying they would. Some clubs negotiated shorter and lighter schedules with their own locker rooms to get them back.
Both episodes left a mark on the argument. The 2020 season went ahead on schedule without a single spring practice, and the quality of play did not obviously suffer. Coaches drew the conclusion that they had managed in spite of it. Many players drew the conclusion that the spring had never been as necessary as they were told.
The proposal to scrap spring practice for a longer run-up to camp
That second conclusion became a proposal. In the spring of 2024 it was widely reported that the NFLPA was drafting a plan to overhaul the offseason: eliminate the voluntary on-field work of April, May and June, and have players report earlier in the summer instead, for a longer and more gradual build-up into training camp.
The case for it rests on bodies and on calendars. Under the present arrangement players stop in mid-June, rest for five or six weeks, and then start again abruptly in late July. Soft-tissue injuries, hamstrings and calves above all, cluster in the first days of camp, and the union's argument is that one continuous ramp would be kinder than two starts with a gap between them. The plan would also give players a longer unbroken stretch away after the season ends, from January until early summer, in place of a spring cut up by reporting dates.
The case against it comes from two directions.
Coaches dislike it for the reason one would expect. The spring is teaching time, and for a new staff it is the only chance to install a system before the pressure of camp. Young players and those on the roster's fringe have their own stake, since OTAs are where an undrafted rookie gets enough repetitions to be noticed, a point that connects to how teams fill out the practice squad behind the 53.
The second objection comes from players themselves, and it is about July. The dead period is the one part of the year when a veteran with a family can take a vacation while the children are out of school. A plan that starts the summer build-up in late June or early July takes that away. Support inside the union has been real and not unanimous.
The offseason program is written into the 2020 agreement, which runs through the 2030 season, so any overhaul has to be bargained with the league. It is likely to be bargained alongside something else. Owners have pushed for an eighteenth regular-season game, a subject covered in our guide to how many games are in an NFL season, and the shape of the offseason is one of the things players could ask for in exchange. A spring with fewer practices, or none, is a plausible part of the price.
Until the two sides bargain a different number, the agreement's figure is ten. More on the league's rules and its calendar is collected in the site's American football section.