Reacting to early free agency
From Metcalf to Najee, a dozen blurbs reacting to free agency's biggest stories
So much has happened in the past week, and then just in the past 24 hours. Because the salary cap keeps escalating in a massive way, and above expectations when many deals that are a few years old were signed, far more teams have far more available money to spend.
That doesn’t mean that every random player is going to get a mega-deal, because teams also have done a better job of understanding opportunity cost and replaceability in recent seasons, and that type of efficiency — embodied by the current champions, the Eagles, who have won two Super Bowls with shrewd roster-building in the past decade — is very much en vogue right now. But you need talent, and one thing the realities of the cap has meant has been teams being far more willing to pay the premium to re-sign their own players, rather than let them walk and try to find replacements.
Broadly, this has meant the few teams that didn’t put themselves in a great cap situation and needed to cut contracts this offseason are really struggling. The Saints are always the top example of this, but the Falcons had to cut Grady Jarrett almost directly as a result of the Kirk Cousins contract, the 49ers have seen a ton of talent leave to other destinations, and the Texans have traded away multiple offensive linemen after a season where C.J. Stroud took the second-most sacks in football and protection seemed like a major concern. (Houston went hard last offseason, and has made other additions this year, so for a team with a rookie-contract quarterback, they are surprisingly thin in cap space.)
The moves come like a whirlwind, and I have takes on so many of them, so I figured I’d do a post today just firing off thoughts on all the movement so far this offseason. We’re still only technically in the legal tampering period, on the cusp of the official start of free agency, but with the early trades, the re-signings, and then the first wave of new deals being announced yesterday and today, a significant amount of the veteran offseason roster movement around the league has already transpired.
Most of the below are nuanced discussions, and could be their own posts of 1,000 words or more. To try to shorten them, I’ll focus more on stuff I feel is adding to the broader discussion than regurgitating the basics around a player or situation. Questions about things like how Najee Harris performed on his rookie contract will be assumed to be fairly straightforward, and I’ve covered all that stuff in all my other writing over time, but feel free to drop questions for anything that’s difficult to follow.
These are not going to be in order, but I’m going to try to stick to things I think are most significant.
The Bears worked in the trenches
I don’t know a ton about line play, but the Bears traded for two big-name guards and then doled out a big center contract, to replace all three of their interior offensive line slots, before also adding Jarrett and Dayo Odeyingbo on the defensive line.
It’s extremely clear Ben Johnson wanted to rebuild the offensive line first and foremost, which was of course a massive part of the success of the Lions’ offense, as well as offenses like the Eagles. As defenses continue to get lighter, having these big bodies on the interior that can really move people can be huge for the run game. Additionally, while maybe a decade ago offensive line play was perhaps oversimplified to the tackles being pass protectors and interior linemen being run-game guys, the sense I get is those lines are blurrier these days, and the interior protection is massive for pass-game stuff as defenses often attack those A gaps with pressure on key downs. As everything speeds up, you gotta have guys on the interior that can keep from a pass play getting blown up before it even starts with that quick interior pressure.
The Bears already have skill-player talent, even if Keenan Allen leaves. D.J. Moore, Rome Odunze, and Cole Kmet are all under contract. There’s talk about how Johnson feels about D’Andre Swift, but he’s under contract and not really moveable until next offseason, as well. I’ll want to see how the skill-position stuff shakes out, particularly at RB where people are talking about Ashton Jeanty as the 10th-overall pick, but I really like this direction from the Bears. Under GM Ryan Poles, the Bears have at times seemed to lack direction with their moves, which makes these early returns so fascinating to me, as we seem to be seeing immediate impact from Johnson with a far more focused and deliberate team-building process. It’s all favorable for the hopes that Caleb Williams will be ready to starting turning things around in Year 2, a la Bryce Young’s 2024 improvements.
Vikings also built on the interior of the trenches
The NFC North is going to be absolutely brutal next year. Minnesota added Ryan Kelly at center, Will Fries at guard, and both Jonathan Allen and Javon Hargrave at DT. An emphasis on the interior of the line on both sides of the ball was clear.
They also brought back Aaron Jones, and like the Bears their skill position group is good. In fact, Minnesota’s is significantly better, as Justin Jefferson and Jordan Addison is probably the best WR duo in the entire NFL — as I’ve been writing, people are not looking far enough back at Addison’s resume, but he’s a budding superstar in his own right, having just finished his age-22 season but already having scored 20 NFL touchdowns — and then they also boast a clear top-10 TE, plus Jones’ explosiveness at RB.
They also brought Byron Murphy back at CB, and there were several teams hoping to get him. The Vikings definitely spent over the past couple days, and J.J. McCarthy is going to step into a good situation. He missed all of last year, but he was with the team, in the meeting rooms, and learning. Kevin O’Connell is a very good coach. I’m optimistic about Minnesota, and think what we learned from the Sam Darnold 2024 season is we should expect McCarthy’s statistics to play up, whether he’s good or not. If he’s catastrophic, that’ll be an issue, but if he’s just below average, he should look pretty solid (and perhaps good), and there’s a chance he’s just good right from his first NFL snaps, at which point I think the supporting cast and coaching staff will make him look like a stud.
Deebo’s fit with Washington
I’ve seen a lot, and said some on a recent Stealing Bananas, about Deebo Samuel’s fit with the Commanders. One of the things that happens in spots like this is the back end gets taken for granted a little bit, but the 49ers’ situation gets fascinating quick.
Let’s do Deebo first, though. I probably didn’t do a good enough job tracking how his numbers split prior to and after getting pneumonia last year, and it muddies some of my earlier discussion on him in places like the TPRR post. There, I talked about an age cliff, but I also noted he just turned 29 in January, so I was speaking a bit about his RB usage in the past as a possible explanation. Perhaps the most significant note in that writeup is how his 2024 wasn’t an outlier, but rather a follow up of a similarly poor 2022, where he bounced back in 2023 but now has two tough years in his past three, in terms of stats like YPRR, though his 2023 was a legit very strong year in between there.
Broadly, I don’t think we’ll know what Deebo is or isn’t, but there’s clear upside in an offense that will use his skill set well if he’s in a good place physically, and stays healthy. I’d expect all the short-area stuff that was going to Olamide Zaccheaus, and some of the stuff Terry McLaurin was getting in the RPO game — he scored a 58-yard TD in the playoff win over the Lions on a ball caught behind the line of scrimmage — to go over to Deebo. I also suspect he’ll get some air yards, but for the most part I think we’re talking a low aDOT and the need for a lot of yards after the catch for a big season, something Deebo is extremely capable of, and the set-up favors because of how Jayden Daniels creates the multidimensional run issues in the box at the start of those RPO plays, which keeps the perimeters lightly guarded when he does pull the ball and throw it outside. This is a really crucial point to my Deebo optimism — I essentially don’t think he’s going to have to break as many tackles as he should have to, to be efficient after the catch.
Having Deebo is only a plus for Daniels, whose passing numbers will see a bump if Deebo is able to capture something close to his ball-in-hand peak and create after the catch for some big plays in 2025. Daniels also got a new left tackle in Laremy Tunsil, via trade.
I also think that while Deebo may impact McLaurin’s role near the line of scrimmage, he’s mostly a complementary receiver to McLaurin’s skill set, and McLaurin wasn’t doing a ton of that anyway. The upside of a McLaurin-Deebo duo with Daniels pulling the trigger is frankly a lot higher than I think people realize, while there are also some limitations as well if the Deebo age-related concerns do play a role.
The impact of Deebo’s exit on San Francisco
As I said, I think this stuff is pretty fascinating as well. I didn’t do a good job of breaking down Ricky Pearsall in the TPRR piece, noting his 9.1 YPT was solid and his timeline was obviously thrown off by the shooting incident, and then I’d imagine they have plans for him, which I feel strongly about now. That said, I’m probably going to be out on Pearsall.
The part of his profile I didn’t emphasize was the 14.4% TPRR. By the time Pearsall got healthy, Brandon Aiyuk was out, as he was lost for the year in Pearsall’s first career game in Week 7. Christian McCaffrey played just four games, but Pearsall had basically no role in those.
Pearsall started his career with 15 targets in his first three games, as the team seemed to be trying to get their first-round pick going. The last of those games was CMC’s first, and from there, while CMC was a big part of the gameplan for the next three weeks, Pearsall saw 3 targets and didn’t catch a pass, while playing 59%, 67%, and 73% of the snaps, so he was out there. In the first two games after McCaffrey was out again, Pearsall caught 1 pass in each. Then he closed the season with a 4-4-37 line in Week 16, a huge 10-8-141-1 line in Week 17, and an 8-6-69-1 line in Week 18, all losses, and importantly all after the 49ers were essentially admitting their season was over.
The point of that is while the 49ers were smart to use that time to try to develop a guy they see as important to their future, when they were still competing in a more serious way, Pearsall was out there running empty routes, despite the aforementioned post-pneumonia Deebo struggles and Aiyuk’s absence. You know who wasn’t running empty routes? Jauan Jennings, who thrived given the available opportunity, running a massive 25.7% TPRR for the season that indicates the type of need the 49ers had for someone to step up. Pearsall was not only not a young rookie, he was outright old, having turned 24 in September. Again, he got shot, and that’s horrible, and it’s also really difficult to account for. He lost practice time, and I might be overthinking this. But the parts of his season that are most concerning to me aren’t actually his first few games, but rather after he was seemingly involved for a few weeks, and he just wasn’t making a lot of plays, and then the team started to prioritize other stuff.
The big concern with what will certainly be Pearsall Year 2 breakout hype, for me, is Deebo’s departure doesn’t actually open up as much work as it seems if you consider how good Jennings was. I’m buying Jauan Jennings, which means you still have him, George Kittle coming off another monster season, and then the expectation of a lot more snaps from the combination of McCaffrey and Aiyuk, even given McCaffrey’s age and the reality that Aiyuk may not be 100% in Week 1. We also have Jordan Mason as a legit breakout No. 2 RB who missed the late part of the season after his own injury, but the likelihood of the 49ers being without both CMC and Mason for long stretches again in 2025 is — while not small — lower than it probably feels like.
The 49ers’ 2024 season was a disaster, and they’ll look for new answers in 2025. Pearsall is certain to be a big part of that, and his early ADP reflects that. But I think his path to a key role in the offense is more blocked than it feels at first blush, and I’d definitely — without question — prefer Jennings straight up. As it stands, in early Underdog drafts, Jennings is going at an ADP of 67.2, while Pearsall is a half-round behind him at 74.8, and then Aiyuk comes in at 77.1. Given Underdog’s format with the emphasis on late-season production, I’m also definitely in on Aiyuk at that price, over Pearsall at his.
The “long view” on Pearsall is not a player who definitely can’t produce, but his collegiate production profile was shaky — he never had 1,000 yards at that level despite five seasons, and didn’t even catch 50 passes in a year until he was a fifth-year senior — and he didn’t have the type of rookie year that screams, “This guy can carve out a meaningful role among other good players.” That would’ve been true of Jennings, as well, and maybe the Jennings 2024 success story is the reason to buy some Pearsall. But at these prices, there’s a lot of optimism in the Year 2 upside case for a guy who will be 25 and not really my type of Year 2 bet anyway.
Put differently, while this last note is more “effect” than “cause” of my pessimism, when we reach projection season I won’t be default projecting Pearsall much volume at all compared to his teammates who have shown real ability to earn volume and will on their merits demand strong target projections. I’m OK with that kind of profile at certain prices in a “bet on uncertainty” kind of way, but it’s undeniably shaky at the Round 6/7 turn.