Free agency was supposed to begin on Tuesday. It began on Sunday, thanks to a flood of leaks regarding tentative deals that started when news broke of Ndamukong Suh’s plan to sign with the Dolphins.
The league doesn’t like it, for obvious reasons. The goal has been to nudge attention and focus to the official launch of free agency at 4:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday, complete with a countdown clock and a plan for wall-to-wall coverage as soon as the market opens.
And then the market opened before it was supposed to open.
The benefit has been an advance surge in interest, traffic, etc. But that has disrupted the NFL’s plan for Tuesday appointment viewing -- and it has delayed the desired evolution of free agency into a college-style signing day.
Before the league sends Ted Wells to all 32 team facilities to look at emails and text messages aimed at showing teams made offers and/or struck deals in violation of the league’s look-but-don’t-touch mandate, the folks who came up with the illogical negotiate-but-don’t-offer rule should look in the mirror. The NFL made this mess by allowing negotiations, but expecting that negotiations wouldn’t actually occur.
Negotiations can’t happen without the exchange of offers. And by allowing teams to negotiate with agents, trading positions aimed at eventually striking a deal, how did the league not realize that deals would inadvertently be reached?
As one league source explained it to PFT, too many people in the league office lack the experience of ever working with teams and doing the job of acquiring players. The end result becomes rules that aren’t functional, and that ignore the practical realities of trying to compete with other teams who want to sign the same guy.
In the league office’s defense (sort of), it shouldn’t require practical experience working with a team to understand that negotiations will result in the making of offers and the eventual striking of a deal. The real problem for the league isn’t that deals were done; it’s that word got out of the done deals.
So why not simply ban negotiations? Last week, Browns quarterback Josh Mccown made a great point regarding the value of letting players make visits before free agency starts, without the urgency of signing a deal.
So maybe the better pre-free agency approach would be to get rid of negotiations entirely and instead allow players to visit teams for a week or so before the official opening of the free-agency period, with negotiations permitted to begin only when the market officially opens. Maybe that would have made it easier for a guy like running back Frank Gore to make a decision without changing his mind.
Of course, that cuts against the NFL’s desire to eventually drop the curtain and have guys start putting on hats revealing their next destinations. But it would at least keep the flood of reports of done deals from hitting the wire before the process of striking deals officially starts.
Sure, negotiations would still occur (as they currently do before the negotiating window opens). But the ban on negotiations will make it far more likely that reports won’t prematurely emerge of deals being done.
