Free Agency Frenzy

I have followed football for a long time, and I have never seen a day like yesterday. It’s quite possible I’ll never see a day like it again. Many people, including me, expected the official start of the new season to be anticlimactic thanks to all the agreements announced over the weekend. Boy, were we wrong.

Yesterday the NFL lost its mind. I wish I could cover it all, but instead I’ll just stick to the moves from the past few days that made me audibly gasp when I read about them for the first time.

Saints trade Jimmy Graham and 4^th round pick to Seahawks for Max Unger and 1^st round pick

 

The biggest deal of the day, and probably the most lopsided. Jimmy Graham is a very talented player, but he has been trending downhill over the past couple years, struggling with injuries and failing to expand his game. In 2011 it was very reasonable to call him the best in the league at his position, a young, athletic talent who put up big numbers while still having plenty of room to grow. Well now he’s 28 years old, and he still has very little idea how to run routes in the NFL. He is still big, and he can still outjump opposing players, but he brings nothing as a blocker. He’ll immediately become the best receiving threat on Seattle’s team, and he can be a very useful piece for their offense. But the cost of what they gave up is simply too much.

Unger has had some issues with injuries also, but when he’s been healthy he’s been one of the best run blocking centers in the NFL. It was staggering to see how drastically Seattle’s offensive line fell off when he missed time last year, and I can’t imagine how they think they can replace him.

In the end, I think a straight up trade of Unger for Graham would have been fair for both sides. The fact that Seattle also threw in a 1^st round pick is mind boggling. The Seahawks have several positions at which they are in drastic need of help, and surrendering their best asset is a horrendous error (a topic I will cover at some point in the next couple weeks.) Best case scenario, Graham returns to being the best tight end in the league as he was three years ago, and the trade comes out as a wash. Much more likely, New Orleans will end up as the clear winner of this trade.

Ravens trade Haloti Ngata and 7^th round pick to Lions for 4^th and 5^th round picks

A great move by the Ravens, getting something back for a player they were going to cut anyway. Baltimore is one of the best teams in the league at acquiring midround draft picks because of stuff like this, dumping over the hill veterans who they have no use for anymore. They have slowly rebuilt their front seven into one of the best in the league, and with young talent on the line they have no real need for Ngata, even after a resurgent season in 2014.

The Lions should not feel good about this. They made this move out of panic, giving up two useful assets for an aging defensive lineman because of the loss of Ndamukong Suh and the potential departure of Nick Fairley. In doing so they saddled themselves with one of the worst contracts in the league. It’s likely that they will restructure, but right now the $16 million cap hit for Ngata is the one of the two highest for any defensive tackle in the league (depending on the structure of Suh’s new deal in Miami).

As a fun fact, do you know who is responsible for the fourth biggest cap hit of all NFL defensive tackles? That would be Suh, who is still counting more than $9 million against Detroit’s salary cap next year. That’s right, Detroit currently has more than $25 million tied up in defensive tackles and only one player who could reasonably be called a starter.

Torrey Smith signs with San Francisco 49ers: 5 years $40 million, $22 million guaranteed

This was a move we knew about over the weekend, but no one saw the terms of this deal coming. That is a lot of money to give to a wide receiver, the fifth most guaranteed money among active receiver contracts. It is significantly more than Eric Decker, a more accomplished player, and Golden Tate, a more talented player, received on the free agent market a year ago.

On some level I can see why the 49ers made this move. Smith gives them something their offense has lacked over the past few years, a legitimate deep threat. The biggest asset Colin Kaepernick brings to the table (besides his rushing ability) is a cannon of an arm, but until now they really haven’t been able to exploit teams down the field. This is the area in which Smith excels, beating opposing defenders down the field and using his ball skills to either make the catch or draw pass interference. He will be useful to San Francisco’s offense, but I don’t see any way he lives up to what they’re paying him.

Patrick Willis announces retirement

This came out of nowhere on Monday. Less than two years Willis was the best in the league at his position, still not 30 with a seemingly long career ahead of him. He went down with a toe injury last year, but everyone assumed he would be back this season. The question for the 49ers was how they would make it work with him, Navarro Bowman, and Chris Borland competing for playing time at inside linebacker. Now they don’t have that problem.

There are a number of factors I see playing into this. First and foremost is health. People don’t seem to realize how nasty toe injuries can get in the NFL, and just how long they could linger. It’s possible that Willis still isn’t close to full health, and the idea of trying to get ready for another season on a poorly functioning foot can’t be appealing. There are also reports that this toe has been bothering him for the past few years, and if he came back there is no guarantee he wouldn't injure it again.

There is another factor to consider, and that is the 49ers themselves. They may have come to the conclusion that the best path was to stick with the two younger linebackers, leaving Willis and his $8 million cap hit next year on the outside looking in. We’ll never know what they were truly planning, but it’s not impossible to imagine them telling him that they were going to let him go, at which point he decided retirement was preferable to free agency.

Whatever the case, one thing is clear. Patrick Willis is a Hall of Famer. I don’t care that he only played eight seasons. They were among eight of the best years by an inside linebacker in NFL history. From the time he entered the league until injuries began to hamper him over the past two years, he was the best in the NFL at his position. He should go into the Hall of Fame as soon as he’s eligible, and there should be no debate about it.

  

Indianapolis Colts sign Trent Cole and Frank Gore, linked to Andre Johnson

I’m combining these three into a single move because there is a clear, overarching theme: aging players on their way out of the league. These are the sort of moves made by a desperate team with a win-now attitude, the sort we’ve seen from New Orleans and Denver over the past few years. For them it made sense. Their teams were built around Peyton Manning and Drew Brees, elite quarterbacks working on a ticking clock. They were willing to ignore their future because it wasn’t clear that they had a future after their stars decided to retire.

That isn’t the case in Indianapolis. They have Andrew Luck, probably the best young quarterback in the league. He will be the foundation of their team for at least the next ten years, and it seems strange that they would be so desperate to win immediately. Signing these veterans has no long term upside, just immediate potential for a team most people think is still a decent distance away from being a Super Bowl contender.

But there is another factor that needs to be taken into consideration, one that is the primary force behind Indianapolis’s decision to make these moves. Thanks to the rookie wage scale, they have Luck under contract for only $6 million this year, an absurdly great deal for the team. This gives them the room to make whatever additions they need. Unfortunately, this window is closing. Sometime in the next year or two Luck will receive a new contract, one that will likely earn him more than $20 million a year. Indianapolis has progressed further into the playoffs each of the past three seasons, but with very little young talent on their roster they need to be aggressive while they can still take advantage of Luck’s cost effectiveness. Once he starts making market value, they will need to completely alter how they construct their team.

Philadelphia Eagles

I am a great admirer of Chip Kelly. I think he is a fantastic, innovative head coach who found remarkable success in college and saw immediate results upon moving to the NFL. I think he has had a lot of good ideas that other coaches should embrace, and I would call his first two years in Philadelphia a resounding success. That said, I have to put myself firmly in the “skeptical” camp when looking at what he’s done since taking over player personnel for the Eagles in January.

The first big move was the trade of LeSean McCoy for Kiko Alonso. That caught me a bit off guard, but the more I think about it, the better the deal looks for the Eagles. McCoy is a fantastic player, and I expect him to be a very productive player in Buffalo over the next couple seasons. But he was costing a lot against Philadelphia’s salary cap, and getting a younger player at a more valuable position is the best return they could have ever hoped for. I don’t buy into the idea that Kelly is “collecting” Oregon players. I think he just went out and acquired a very talented young player who happened to have played for him in college.

The McCoy trade was a smart move, but past that is where I start to get skeptical. They cleared up a huge amount of cap space by trading McCoy and releasing several veterans, but the way they used this cap space was highly suspect. They allowed Jeremy Maclin to leave for Kansas City after a year in which he was their only real threat in the passing game. They are now down to Riley Cooper and Jordan Matthews on the outside, not the most inspiring collection of talent.

The player of theirs they chose to resign instead was Brandon Graham. Graham has been a fantastic pass rusher in small doses for them since they drafted him in the first round in 2010, but almost everyone agreed it was in both sides’ best interest for him to move on. He isn’t a particularly versatile player, and he was out of place in Philadelphia’s 3-4 scheme. I see no reason to believe that they will alter the scheme to better suit him next season, and even though they got a good deal I can’t help but think that he will still fail to meet expectations.

One player they did not get a good deal on was Byron Maxwell. The number two cornerback in Seattle last season, Maxwell signed in Philadelphia for an absurd contract of $63 million over 6 years with $26 million guaranteed. I think Maxwell is a good player. I think he may even be able to reach Pro Bowl level in Philadelphia. But they are paying him like the best cornerback in the league, and even if everything breaks right there is no way he lives up to this contract.

Prior to the trade they made yesterday, it was possible to see some underlying logic in their moves. They were casting aside their skill position players in order to build their defense. Kelly has a reputation as an offensive guru—and no one buys into this reputation more than Kelly himself—and he firmly believes that his system will succeed regardless of who is manning the skill positions. He has less trust in his defense, so it would make sense for him to try to turn that side of the ball into an elite unit on the basis of talent alone.

It's difficult to find similar logic behind the Sam Bradford trade from yesterday. For those of you who weren’t following the news, Philadelphia and St Louis essentially made a swap of unwanted quarterbacks, Bradford for Nick Foles. There was also an exchange of draft picks, which turned into a mini drama of its own yesterday as reporters scrambled to figure out the exact details. For a while it was rumored that the two teams would swap second round picks, Philadelphia moving up from 52 to 41 and St Louis dropping down. Then there were rumors that the teams were actually swapping first round picks, the Eagles going from number 20 to number 10. Finally, the full details came out, and it was even more confusing.

I won’t go into everything here because even I don’t understand it. There are a lot of picks that may or may not be moved based on how much Bradford plays for the Eagles next year. The short story is, the Eagles actually gave the Rams more than they received in terms of draft assets, despite the general consensus that Foles is a more valuable commodity.

I don’t understand the logic behind this at all, not unless it’s part of a bigger plan. Bradford might find some success going back to an offensive system closer to his quick hitting Oklahoma team, but in the end he is still a painfully mediocre quarterback with almost no upside. In the past few days Philadelphia had been linked to deals involving Colin Kaepernick or a top ten pick that would give them the ability to draft Marcus Mariota. Both of these quarterbacks would better fit what Kelly wants to do.

That said, I highly suspect that Kelly has something more planned. So many of the picks are tied up in Bradford’s playing time, possibly because they plan to move him again. Foles was a major part of every trade rumor they were involved in, and it’s possible that the teams they are negotiating with are higher on Bradford than they are on Foles. Only time will tell what will happen, but if the Eagles do go into next year with Mark Sanchez and Sam Bradford competing for the starting quarterback job, then they deserve every bit of ridicule currently being thrown at them.

If there is an underlying problem here, it comes back to Kelly’s arrogance. That may sound like an insult, but arrogance can absolutely be an asset in the NFL. I doubt there are many people more arrogant than Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, and here they are celebrating their fourth Super Bowl title together. The thing is, they both have a level of awareness to go along with their arrogance, awareness Kelly may lack.

This comes back to the biggest challenge of college coaches moving to the NFL. In college, a coach runs every part of a football program. They coach the players on the field, and they decide what players to add to the team. As Bill Parcells would say, they are responsible for both cooking the meal and for buying the groceries. That isn’t the case for most teams in the NFL. Most coaches only serve an advisory role in deciding who to add, the final decision belonging to the general manager.

Over the past year we have seen two major breakdowns of relationships between coaches and general managers, both involving former college head coaches. Doug Marrone resigned as head coach of the Buffalo Bills after repeated issues with management, and Jim Harbaugh “mutually parted ways” with the 49ers due to conflict with general manager Trent Baalke. Both of these men were used to having absolute control over a football team, and both struggled when they were forced to share this responsibility with other parties.

Philadelphia went through a similar, if quieter, power struggle. The only difference was that theirs ended with their coach being given all the power. Chip Kelly is in complete control now, and he seems determined to make it clear that this is his team, even if it means parting ways with every player associated with the former management. Kelly is a football mastermind, and this may work out in the long run. But he could also be biting off far more than he can chew, with the ultimate result being the total collapse of the Philadelphia Eagles organization.