NFL Player News

Pierce was declared out on Friday due to a concussion he suffered in Week 15. Fellow WR Ashton Dulin (ankle) is active and in line for increased snaps with Pierce out. TE Mo Alie-Cox (hip) and K Matt Gay (neck) are also active while LB EJ Speed (knee) is the Colts’ other injury inactive.

Cleveland’s long-time guard will hit free agency and has already announced he won’t return to the Browns after being benched at points towards the end of the season. Teller finished with a 62.2 PFF offensive grade, his second season in a row under 70 as he struggled through injuries. It’s possible he’s not a star guard anymore, but it certainly seems like NFL teams believe he has something left in the tank.

Bradbury has been a capable-if-unexciting center for a few years now, and even though the Patriots made it the Super Bowl he posted his worst PFF run blocking grade of his career in the process. Bradbury has one year remaining on a two-year contract signed last offseason. He may not be Chicago’s only attempt to address the sudden retirement of Drew Dalman, but he offers them a capable floor.

Woefully ineffective for the Raiders, Cappa was benched after Week 3 and only wound up hitting 538 snaps on the season after injuries forced him into the lineup from Week 13 on. Cappa enters his age-31 season off back-to-back release-worthy seasons and likely won’t be guaranteed anything if he wants to continue playing.

He ultimately predicts (not reports) the Patriots will sign Pierce to a four-year, $104 million contract. It’s certainly an outcome that would be unsurprising at this point, though Dianna Russini has mentioned that the price tag could continue to climb on Pierce over the weekend. We were expecting the Patriots to be one of the main teams in the race for Pierce the second they released Stefon Diggs and this article does nothing to dissuade us from this notion.

The Joshua Palmer fantasy stock could be in shambles, folks. Buscaglia connects the Bills to a wide assortment of receivers, notably stopping for a beat on Romeo Doubs, Jalen Nailor, and Calvin Austin as particularly good fits for Buffalo. Moore and Khalil Shakir are the two easy top targets, any other additions would likely sink Palmer into a background role in the second year of his contract.

He also links Romeo Doubs to the 49ers, who will have a big hole at wideout with the expected release of Brandon Aiyuk and impending free agency of Jauan Jennings. We’ve yet to see any beat or any of the sources report Jennings as someone the 49ers believe will return. The 49ers do hypothetically have the cap space to be involved in the Pierce sweepstakes if they’d like to be, but we’d be surprised if they won a bidding war against the major salary cap space super powers.

Schultz has never seemed like a perfect solution for the Texans since joining the team in 2023, but they keep coming up with little in the way of alternatives. He’ll likely remain in the low-end TE1/high-end TE2 pool as he enters his age-30 season. It’s hard to say confidently based on early reporting what the long-term cap impact of this is, but the 2027 extension will clash with a void year so perhaps the Texans already felt committed to him for that season in some way.

Boyd predicts (but doesn’t report) that Pierce will leave in free agency, and projects a quick pivot that would include Michael Pittman staying with the team and the Colts chasing another receiver to replace Pierce outside. Shaheed does fit the need for speed even if he doesn’t exactly have the contested-catch ability that Pierce leads with. Shaheed has already been linked to the Commanders, Bills, and Raiders this offseason — though the Bills have since traded for DJ Moore.

The Athletic’s Josh Kendall answered a mailbag question about this by simply saying “whether or not they listen is another question” and noting that Kevin Stefanski sounded “very much like he wanted to coach Pitts for a year.” So the open question on both sides is whether the Falcons would actually be willing to hear out an offer. It’s possible the Falcons get an offer they can’t refuse, but it sounds like based on the reporting the Falcons are more likely to sit tight on Pitts through his franchise tag.

Hill has a $3.8 million cap figure, of which the Ravens can save $3.1 million with a release. He missed the final six weeks of the season with a long-term neck injury, and turns 29 next November. Zrebiec brought up this idea in mentioning that the Ravens could chase a running back in the lower rounds of the draft to add to the room behind Derrick Henry.