The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL - How Can Free Agency Help Teams Win the Super Bowl?

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

For years, free agency lessons are typically framed about how teams falter in the market. But the 2024 Eagles were a shining example of how the right injection of free-agent talent can propel a team to a championship. With this year's champs in mind, Robert Mays and Derrik Klassen looked through the past decade of Super Bowl participants to see what lessons we can learn about the right ways to use FA. How many teams spent big? How important were the right bargain signings? And what advice, if any, can we give to teams looking for the right boost from the veteran pool in 2025? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. I'm Robert Mays. Got sort of a fun idea for you guys today. I've always felt like this period of the calendar was a little bit awkward in the NFL offseason. We got the combine next week, but that's kind of a draft event, but it's kind of not. And free agency is going to happen before we get to the draft anyway. So we're going to talk about free agency more in depth over the next couple weeks.

But rather than kind of shifting our focus to this pool of players, I actually wanted to look at free agency. through a look-back lens instead. I had Derek come on today, and we looked at the last 10 years of Super Bowl participants, right? So it's 20 teams over a 10-year period. And what I wanted to do, using this year's Eagles as a sort of reference point, is look at what the free agent,

or if you're expanding it a little bit, veteran edition halls looked like for these teams in any given year before they went to the Super Bowl. And the reason I wanted to do this is I was just being, I was curious as I was thinking about the Eagles about how crucial that influx or injection of veteran talent in a single offseason often is for these teams who are trying to win championships. So that's what Derek and I did today. We really went through the last decade of teams that played in the Super Bowl and tried to figure out if there were any through lines or themes for what their free agency periods looked like and how we can maybe learn some lessons. for that as we project forward in what teams should be trying to do in free agency. So this is fun.

A little bit of a nostalgia play, some surprising things that we stumbled on to. And I think by the end of it, we did land on a couple lessons that are worthwhile as you guys are thinking about how your team can weaponize free agency. So let's get to that conversation with Derek right now. All right, Derek. Today we're going to be digging into something that, in my opinion, is kind of a solve for the weirdness of this week in the NFL calendar. I never know what to do between the Super Bowl and the Combine

because it's such an odd kind of middle ground with the way the offseason is laid out. Because we have a draft event next week, and me and Dane are going to do a Combine preview on Friday leading into the weekend about what to look for in Indy. Some of the guys Dane is looking at in terms of testing, you're starting to dig into the draft pool now.

so some of the things that you're looking for. But the problem is, you can't just go full on into draft talk because free agency happens before the draft does. It's coming right out of the combine. And we have a bunch of team-specific conversations we're having next week because a lot of our writers are going to be an indie. So I've always kind of struggled with how to program this week. So what we're going to do today,

and this is a topic I laid out for you over the last 24 hours or so, is just kind of a weird thing I've had in the back of my mind on my like scroll of offseason stuff I was interested in that I was going to maybe say for later this spring, but I figured it was a good thing to hit before free agency because of what we're going to talk about today. And honestly, this is the perfect week to do it. You know how in real life the, like just for like purposes of doing not football stuff,

the week after Christmas in between New Year's is like not real? Like nothing that happens in that time space is real. So true. For the NFL calendar this week between, mean, like this couple weeks between the Super Bowl and the Combine actually kicking off is like the NFL specific version of that. So this is the perfect time to just dive into pretty much any weird topic or thing that you could come up with. We were going to do maybe something about the tag candidates, but there's only really one tag candidate. And we've

already talked about T. Higgins a bunch. So there just wasn't a good thing that was obvious for me today. And so what I wanted to chat about is something I was thinking about really in the week before the Super Bowl and just looking at some of the moves that the Eagles made in free agency last spring, whether it's Sequan Barkley, Zach Bonn, Mackay Beckton, C.J. Gardner Johnson. And you can expand the free agent thought and conversation to a team like the Ravens this year, right? They go out and get Derek Henry. So the thought I was having and just the one I was kicking around was, how important is an injection of free agent talent to an individual team's season? And then if you take it even further than that,

How important is an injection of free agent talent? And what does that injection have to look like if you're a team that wants to reach the Super Bowl? And so to do that and kind of using this year's Eagles as an example and then going back through history, what we're going to do is we're going to look at the last decade of Super Bowl participants and look at their free agent halls from that year as a way to determine or help give us sort of a guide to what a fruitful free agency period. looks like if you're a team that wants to win the Super Bowl that year. And why I think this is useful is that a lot of the time around this time of year, there's a general feeling of, well, how useful is free agency really? What can you really do through free agency? If you're building in through free agency, is that actually the best path to build a winner

in the NFL? So I want to just go back and parse what those free agent halls looked like from the teams that are actually playing at the highest level of the sport over the last 10 years or so. And I think it's going to be instructive too, because a lot of the times I feel like when we do free agent lessons, it's a lot of what not to do and what guys not to chase and then don't overpay this and don't do that and don't chase a guy who just came off of a weird contractor or all this other stuff. Going to the flip side of like, okay, what do the good teams do with free agency? I think is a better use of our time. It's just the general kind of overarching questions here, which will hit in some capacity and then we'll probably address some of those at the end. what do the free agent halls for these Super Bowl teams usually look like? How often do they have big ticket guys?

How often do they include dice rolls that outperform expectations? Do they come from particular position groups? So what is the makeup and what are the contours of the free agent classes? And kind of expanding this a little bit just to the veteran addition classes for these teams that ultimately get to the Super Bowl? Because they're going to be some years we look at where it was a trade. Sometimes it's for big draft capital. sometimes it's not, but just how are you adding veteran pieces in the offseason and how important is that pursuit to immediately improving your title chances? That is kind of at the center of what we

wanted to dig into today. So let's do it. Let's start with, let's go all the way back in the last decade or so, and let's start 10 years ago. I wanted to start with a team that you know, love, have thought a lot about, and that is the 2015 Panthers against the 2015 Broncos in Super Bowl 50. Let's start with the Panthers and just look at overall the offseason moves they made from a veteran level that year and what ultimately helped propel them to the 15 win season and the MVP season we saw from Kent Newton and them eventually playing in that Super Bowl. So what stuck out to you as you looked at those moves from the 2015 Panthers? So I think what's interesting and this is actually going to kind of set the table for a lot of what we're doing here is that when you look at the

Panthers roster before a lot of the moves that they made, they had very obvious, like, cornerstone pieces. Cam Newton proved that he was one of the most dynamic pieces in the league. Their interior offensive line was actually already really good. They had guys like Andrew Norwell, Ryan Kalil was still playing center, Triturner at guard. So they had stability there. You had Greg Olson at tight end. And then on the other side of the ball, you had maybe the best linebacker duo in the league in Luke Keeley and Thomas Davis. And so that kind of gave you some real pillars on that side. And so a lot of what they did in free agency that offseason was like, all right, how do we fill in the other spots to make sure that the star power were getting the most out of it? That offseason, they went

out and got Michael Orr to play left tackle on a two-year deal. And that to me was very similar to a team we'll talk about later. The Donovan Smith signing when the chiefs did that a couple years ago, it's like, okay, you just need a guy to make sure that our superstar quarterback can be back there. That was a good one. They go and bring back Ted Ginn to make sure that they have verticality in the offense. He's just the role player, but he ends up being a huge part of their offense. And then on the other side of the ball, they fixed their secondary with some cheap guys in Kurt Coleman, who they signed for two years, 2.8 million, and Charles Tillman, who they signed at the very end of his career on a one-year deal. And both of those guys really short up the spots

that were not very strong suits in the secondary the year before. So they didn't sign a lot of these big ticket guys. They had the big superstar pieces. It was a matter of making sure the guys around them we're not giving up a lot of explosive plays. I think that's a really good point to bring up before we even dig into any of the rest of this. This is not how you build the foundation of your team. The foundation of your team is usually in place before you have this minus one off season

before a championship run. If you look at that team, even guys like Andrew Norwell, he was already on the roster. It was kind of ascending at that time. You mentioned Trey Turner. Greg Olson was somebody they traded for a couple years earlier. Ryan Khalil, a lot of. of the pieces on defense,

almost all of these teams. Some of them had one or two, let's call them Tier 1 or Tier 2 free agents, guys that ultimately are going to be involved in the compensatory formula for you that are sort of big money guys. That happens every once in a while with these teams and it'll be fun to kind of dig into which teams

had them, which team didn't. Almost invariably, if you were a team that goes to the Super Bowl and potentially wins it, you have one or two guys that you sign, and free agency that give you way more than what you initially paid them for. Michael Ower is a perfect example. He signed a two-year $7 million deal that offseason after a pretty rough time in Tennessee

before that. His value was kind of diminished at this point in his career. That deal was 34th among all tackles in the percentage of the cap per APY when he signed it. He played almost 1,300 snaps for that team at left tackle that year. Donovan Smith is a very good parallel. And there are a couple other examples of this, of teams just getting that final piece of the offensive line

to make the rest of it come together on a cheap free agent deal. The Panthers did that with Michael Orr. You mentioned Ted Ginn. The Kirk Coleman one really jumped out to me. And there's going to be a lot of examples of this, where we have a secondary piece that kind of brings the rest of the secondary together and you sign a guy for next to nothing. And then his production vastly outperforms that

in the year where you went to the Super Bowl. that season, Kirk Coleman, was 63rd among safeties and APY as a percentage of the cap. He played 1,200 snaps for that Panthers team. He had nine interceptions that season for Carolina while making next to nothing as a free agent addition. So that's going to be like a consistent theme here when we try to figure out what the secret sauce is. Adding a piece to an unit that is more than the sum of its parts, so offensive line and secondary defensive line, and also having that guy just have a spike in production that year, that is a consistent theme as we go through this show.

And secondary and offensive line specifically are weak link units. And with the secondary, they had Josh Norman on one side, but they needed anybody else to play the other corner spot, and so they bring in Charles Stillman. And then with the offensive line, it was Byron Bell playing left tackle the year beforehand, just not cutting it as a starting NFL left tackle. and Michael Orr wasn't great, but he was good enough.

And that's literally all it needed to be when their interior was as good as it was. So when you have holes specifically at these weak link positions, getting anybody who is just competent, that is enough. And that's all you need to do. And that's all this Panthers team needed to do. I also love you pointing this out. The upgrade from what you had previously, if it was really bad and you get to acceptable levels, we've talked about this a lot over the last 10 years since I started doing this.

That upgrade from bottom of the barrel to middle of the road can be as important as going from middle of the road to great, especially when we're talking about some of these weakling systems. So the Michael Owers and the Charles Tillman's, as part of these overall equations, they're not the signings that are going to blow people away in March and April as we're talking about who won the off season. But these things do come back in a big way later in the year. And the other thing that really jumped out to me, and we might as well just talk about this thematically now, these guys played a lot. These free agents that outperformed expectations,

these are guys who played a thousand snaps for you, 1,100 snaps for you, 1,200 snaps for you, 1,200 snaps for you. They're guys who became fixtures on the defense that year. Some of that is a, that's correlated with health, right? Like, so a lot of this stuff, you could say the same thing about staying healthy, but having these guys be like fixtures of individual units for 1920 games, that's another thing that's going to keep coming up as we talk about these. teams. And that's where you get the values. They were probably paying a lot of these guys hoping that, okay, back up a rotational player, that would be fine. And then they end up asserting themselves as even fine starters. And it's like, okay, we've already got everything that we wanted out of this deal.

The 2015 Broncos is an interesting case. If you look at the free agents or just veterans they added that year, the big one was Darien Stewart, who they signed to a two-year $4 million deal to play safety. Again, played a thousand snaps for them, was making $1.2.2. percent of the cap. Objectively, a very good investment on that side of the ball. They didn't do much else that year in the veteran market, but they did a ton the previous year. So if you look at the way that that defense was built, a lot of the pieces that they brought

in, Akeeb-Talib, DeMarcus Ware, T.J. Ward, they all signed big money deals in free agency in 2014. The biggest thing that team did was change out its coaching staff, and in particular, hire Wade Phillips to be their defensive coordinator. he could unlock all of those pieces that already existed on the roster. So they're kind of a unique case in all of this where they did their free agency spending the year before and it was an injection of coaching talent that ultimately allowed them to be the sort of unit that won a Super Bowl.

Right. It's like part of the equation for what Philly did. Obviously Philly this year added a lot of talent specifically this offseason. We'll talk about that. But also half of the equation for them was, okay, we went from guys like Matt Patricia calling the defense to Vic Fangio, who is obviously one of the best in the league. And that is kind of what we got here with Denver, where it's like, okay, they had the talent in place.

And they, I remember at the time, too, it was very funny. There were a lot of conversations of like, can you really buy the best defense in football? And then a year later, it was very obvious that you could buy the best defense in football. And so getting a guy like- It helps when you have the Von Millers of the world and the Malik Jackson's of the world. And Peyton Manning's playing quarterback on the other side. Like, yeah. In 2015, that didn't necessarily matter because Peyton Manning's corpse was playing quarterback for the 2015 Broncos.

The defense was the most important piece there, obviously, but they did a lot of the building over a multi-year period. But a decent chunk of it did come through free agency. So I think that the core of this, what we're trying to figure out is why do these teams feel different in the year where they get this far? Some teams are fixtures, right? And when we talk about the Patriots and the chiefs in these conversations, it's going to be a slightly different framing than a lot of the other teams that spike for a year or two. But the question becomes, why were you able to be a Super Bowl team in year X and you weren't the year before or the year after? And however you find that spike, some of it can be through coaching talent through scheme, but some of it can also be through the veteran pieces you add in that given year. And so just trying to figure out where those spikes came from, that's also part of the.

the exercise that we're trying to do here. Yeah, and that's kind of what made this Super Bowl fun. It was a little bit like one team was trying to shore up their weaknesses. One team just needed the coach to unlock everything. So let's get to the 2016 Super Bowl. These are obviously the seasons they happen. Like, that's how I think about which year the Super Bowl happened. If you don't, then you're just making things unnecessarily complicated.

So let's start with the 2016 Patriots. The 2016 Patriots, again, and just the Patriots in all of these exercises, it's just slightly different. the way that they built their team and how central it was with Tom Brady and how not aggressive they were in free agency most years, that's going to be a consistent thing as we talk about this. But even if you look at that team, they signed Chris Long,

one year $2.4 million deal that was 51st in APY among defensive ends. He had 65 pressures that year. And so that number keeps coming up, and that's going to keep coming up as we look at, like, rotational defensive line pieces that come in for these championship runs. if you can find a guy that's fairly cheap that can give you between like 50 and 75 pressures over the course of the year,

that's a really nice ingredient to drop in if you can get it at the right price. And Chris Long was that example for the 2016 Patriots. And this one going in probably would have been, even before looking at how all these teams did it, this would have been the archetype that I would have pinned that you see the most of is like the mercenary pass pressure. Because we talk about it every offseason.

It's like which guys, you know, three years ago, it was like, man, who's going to get the Justin Houston and who's going to get Jadavian Clowny every year? It's like, who's going to get that guy that can give you eight sacks and 55 plus pressures? And for the Patriots that year in particular, they happened to get Chris Long, who was on the tail end of his career, but was still able to give you this, especially in that style of defense. And so them getting a little bit more juice on that side of the ball when you know you always have stability on the other side of the ball with Tom Brady, that was like just enough to get them over the edge. And I found this one pretty.

particularly interesting too because the Patriots for a long time did a lot of, weren't that interested in past rushers. I know they had Chandler Jones for a while, but they were very big on like, let's just crush the pocket. And so for them to be like, we need a guy who can just get after it. And for them to go get Chris Long and work out the way it did, I thought was pretty fascinating. So we might as well get into this now because again, talking about certain archetypes, if you look at the Falcons that year, they signed Dwight Freeney that offseason one year,

$1 million to go get Dwight Fridney for the 2016 Falcons. He finished with 63 pressures on that one year deal. And so part of the reason I wanted to do this is this notion of the mercenary pass rusher and going out to get a guy like that. Is that real? Like do these teams actually

get those guys that go to the Super Bowl? Or is this just something that we talk about? And so for both of those teams in 2016 to have those mercenary pass rusher types that were deep into their careers, that weren't making a lot of money, but were very productive. and the overall calculus of what the team is.

It's just a fun little thing to stumble on. It's like, oh, I guess that's real. Like, the mercenary pass rusher thing is part of this conversation. I think that's the best Falcons past rushing season I've ever seen in my life, by the way. With him and Vic Beasley, the one crazy Vic Beasley here and that Dwight Freeney doing what he did? Even that was, like, kind of fake, too. Oh, no, you meant the best season from a Falcons past rusher. Yes, for one guy with Dwight Freeney, yes.

I love the fact that we just had those, like, three extra Dwight Freeney years. Like, he was really good in Arizona, but still, like, he was like 38 years old. So they're like, how much can we possibly pay him? And then they give him a million bucks and he has 63 pressures on the year. If we look at some of the other moves that both of those teams made, the Patriots, the really only other free agent move of that year was they went out and got Chris Hogan on a three-year, $12 million deal. That might seem forgettable.

If you look at Chris Hogan's playoff numbers that year for the 2016 Patriots, they were actually pretty wild. I totally forgot that he had. had nine catches for 180 yards and two touchdowns in the AFC championship game against the Steelers that year. I also forgot that. And this one, too, there's no lesson to be to be gotten from signing Chris Hogan. This is Patriots shit specifically.

This doesn't happen to any other franchise. I'm going to push back on this. I do think if we're trying to manufacture a bigger picture lesson from this, adding verticality to your receiving core when you didn't already have it, I actually have it. I actually do think is a real thing. The Panthers did it the year before with Ginn. So, I mean, yeah. The Panthers did it the year before with Ginn.

There are other guys we're going to talk about here. Brandon Cooks is part of this. You could do Brandon Cooks. If we wanted to go a year further back, we get it on this twice. Yeah. Because the 2014 Patriots added Brandon Cooks as like their vertical element in the offense

before they won the Super Bowl. And then Brandon Cooks in 2018 comes in and adds the vertical element for the Rams as they get to the Super Bowl. So finding an MVS is another one of these guys that we'll talk about as a free agent guy that added a sense of verticality. So finding verticality for the right price in your overall equation offensively, that is the lesson I'm manufacturing from the Chris Hogan deal. Maybe you got me. Maybe I'm just doing a little bit too much like white guy playing receiver for the Patriots.

They were all slightly different. They were. It's important to acknowledge their slight differences. That's fair. That's fair. What was Chris Hogan's like average depth of target that year? It had to be like twice what we were talking about... Oh, it was significantly higher than the other guys. There's no doubt about it.

Okay, so this is important to point out, and this is why even if the white guy Patriots bucket feels like a bucket of all sameness, Chris Hogan that year, for the Patriots in 2016, 13.8 air yards per target that year. Compare that to Julian O'Brien. who is at 8.9. So very different sorts of players within this offense for the 2016 Patriots.

Trey, please take out the Josh Gordon thing. That was the wrong year. So just want to hit that. Let's move to the Falcons. This is, again, a nice combination of different signings. We alluded to the Dwight Frini one. The big one for the Falcons that year, they go out and spend a ton of money

on Alex Mack. Five years, $45 million in the 2016 offseason. That was sixth among centers in APY as a percentage of the cap. he played 1,200 snaps that year and finished second team all pro. So at times, going out and spending at the top of the market on the right player at the right position. And again, I think a lot of these are going to be safeties, offensive Wyman, guys that really do change the complexion of entire units. And Alex Mack for the Falcons that year was a very good example.

I think both of the big guys that they signed that offseason were, I think because they already had Matt Ryan, who was a very good quarterback, Julio Jones, who is obviously one of the most, explosive and best receivers of the generation, you already had some pretty good pop to the offense or like a pretty high ceiling. Getting a guy like Mack who was a very smart and versatile center for them, I think went a long way to raising their floor. And then they signed Muhammad Sunu that offseason who like, Sunu was kind of a boring player, but he was a big body, could catch the ball over the middle of the field, a really sure-handed target. He was a perfect compliment that kind of allowed Julio Jones to fully unlock himself as not purely a vertical threat, but to like to really get the most out of him being your downfield guy. So the Falcons did a really good job of understanding,

okay, Kyle Shanahan can make the offense go and get the explosive stuff. He can make the run game work. Let's make sure our quarterback's not getting hit. Let's make sure he has an option over the middle of the field on the place that he's not throwing to Julio Jones. So that to me, even though they spent a lot of money, this to me was like a good offseason of really understanding exactly what was ailing the team the year before and making sure that they shorted it up. like this a lot because if you look at the offensive line specifically, the offensive line was already built outside of Alex Mack. It had been sort of a multi-year process. So Jake Matthews, they had drafted several years prior. And then they signed Andy Levitre in free agency. Remember that? We came over

from Buffalo. Chris Chester, they signed in free agency. And then Ryan Schrader was their right tackle. And he was somebody that was like a developmental player that eventually got more and more snaps and became a starter. All of those guys were in place in 2015. And then they signed Alex Mac. and suddenly that becomes a good offensive line. You go from like, oh, okay, like this is an interesting collection of guys to Mac being dropped in there and it really brings the room together.

And I think, again, there are going to be a lot of those examples here at various price points. Some of them are cheaper deals like the O or one, but having a guy like Mac playing at that level to kind of really tie the offensive line together, you could feel that when you watch that Atlanta team. Like, that was a very good group

that felt very cohesive even in the moment. And was one of the really, in my opinion, And like the key differences between what the 2015 team felt like, where you liked some of the ideas and you got what they were trying to do, but it wasn't fully realized in the way that it was when we got to 2016. That's the perfect way to explain it. You could see why it might work eventually. And then they went out and made the exact signings that were like,

all right, how do we make sure all of this gets glued together correctly? The 2017 season, the Patriots are involved again here. Very different conversation with the 2017 Patriots about how they spent their money because that was the Stefan Gilmore year. So that was the, it was out of character. They took the huge swing on the market. And he started 16 games and was immediately excellent for that Patriots team. He was incredible.

It was, yeah, Bill didn't very often say, I need this exact thing for an absolute ton of money on the defensive side of the ball. But every now and then he knew he really, really wanted a good man coverage corner. And he said, all right, let me go get Stefan Gilmore. And that certainly solved a problem there. So they spent a ton of money on Stefan Gilmore that year. They also signed Lawrence Guy to a four-year $15 million deal, which that was, that's one of those role player pieces that we talk about. Not super expensive, but played 700 snaps for them that year was very good.

But again, the Patriots are always kind of an outwire to this conversation. Like, most of the teams that we're discussing exist like over here. For the people listening to the podcast, this is great for you. They exist over here, and the Patriots kind of exist over here. Like, they're a moon orbiting the rest of the discussion that we're having. right now. Every once in a while, they're going to be splashy things that are worth talking about, but in the same way that it's sometimes hard to learn lessons team building-wise from what the Patriots were for 20 years, the free agency part of this conversation is sort of similar.

Yeah, exactly. Like, it's just when you have Tom Brady, you can probably get away with some other things that a lot of other teams weren't able to get away with. Yeah, and when you're paying Tom Brady below market value as part of that discussion. All right, before we keep running through these teams, let's take a quick break. So the 2017 Eagles, though, they to me are one of my favorite teams to talk about as part of this exercise. Because they have a lot of guys that fit into these buckets that we're discussing. Chris Long makes your return here one year or later doing essentially the exact same thing. Do the exact same thing for this Eagles team.

He signs a two-year, four and a half million dollar deal in 2017 for Philly. He gets 65 pressures again. On the dot. That's incredible. The exact same production and just, archetype and bucket we're talking about for New England in 2016. He fills for the Eagles in 2017. But my favorite, so the Eagles are kind of a complicated discussion here.

Nick Foles is part of this, which is like, obviously like a total outlier and like the rest of how we talk about any of this. The fact that the backup quarterback they signed in free agency was integral to them winning the Super Bowl, there are no lessons to be learned from that. That was just like an all-time comet-like moment in the history of. of the NFL. Yeah, and he was bad before that. Like, he was very bad

in the couple of years before. He's, I've said before the thing about Nick Foles, he probably has the most volatile career of any NFL player ever. The highs were unbelievably high and the lows were so, so low. But they, that year,

happened to hit a very good high. Thinking about both ends of that spectrum. It's just staggering. Yeah, that first Chip Kelly year, remember he had that game? I think it was against the Reader's seven touchdowns. Where he threw like,

We threw seven touchdowns against the Raiders. And so he was capable of that. And then he was pretty much out of the league before reviving his career. He comes to Philly, does what he does in Philly, gets signed by the Jags, and that's obviously a disaster. But even that year for the Eagles, how bad they were in those last couple regular season games in 2017

with him a quarterback, I want to say the game they played on Christmas Eve that year was against the Raiders. when he just looked completely unplayable. And I was like, this is over. Like, they have absolutely no shot. And then he goes on the most ridiculous heater we've ever seen in the playoffs.

It was amazing, man. Like, I just, because I think you two, didn't he sign with the Chiefs before that? Like, before he got to the Eagles, and he credited, he's like, Andy Reid saved my career. And because he was, yes, he was literally out of the league, basically.

And he comes back for a year, Andy Reid saves him, and then he goes and ends up having a Super Bowl. And it's, like I said, he has the most volatile career, I think we've probably ever seen. So the game was actually on Christmas Day. They beat the Raiders 19 to 10. In that game, Nick Foles finished 19 of 38 in that game for 163 yards. I remember watching that, especially the first half, and just, I chucked it up.

I was like, there's no way. There's absolutely no way that they're going to do anything with this season. What a missed opportunity. And then I was at the NFC championship game where he did what he did. It felt like the Dalton 2015 year, where it's like, man, they had this incredible run and then quarterback gets hurt. All right, it's over. Whatever. Chalk it.

So the Nick Foll's part of this is obviously just like a cool footnote in history, but I don't know if it really applies to the other things we're talking about this conversation. The one thing that does, aside from the Chris Long edition that year, Patrick Robinson for the 2017 Eagles, is going to be something that I think is lost to history for most people outside of the general Philadelphia area. But Patrick Robinson was a former first round pick that signed with the Eagles for one year and $775,000. He was awesome. That entire playoff run. He played 850 snaps for them that year, mostly in the slot. He parlayed that one year's $780,000 deal into a four-year, $20 million deal with the Saints the following offseason. That's what you want.

You want to find the guy for a million bucks who's going to make $10 million guarantee. the following offseason. That's the type of stuff that is part of the secret sauce when you're thinking about how free agency can accelerate these things that consistently come up as you look at these teams.

And especially again, too, what did we talk about the Panthers a couple of times ago? One of your weak link systems where you need it in the secondary, like how do we find a guy who's not going to mess this up for us? And for them to not only get a guy

who wasn't going to mess it up for them, but who was actively a plus for them, a huge, huge one for them on that side of the ball. Corey Graham is kind of a smaller piece to that defense. He played in Buffalo. He was in Chicago for a while. Long time journeyman kind of hybrid defensive back,

played some safety, played some slot corner over those years. He signed for one year, $1.5 million and played 500 snaps. The other big one that year, talking about the NFC championship game, Alshan Jeffrey coming over for one year and having a season he did,

wasn't the sort of one-year flyer we typically talk about because it wasn't cheap. that year when he signed for $9.5 million, it was actually ninth in APY among all receivers. But because I believe he was coming off an injury the previous year in Chicago, so he didn't get like a big multi-year deal from anyone,

took a one-year fire on him, Philly did, and he was huge. He had 69 catches for 1,000 yards that year. He had a dozen touchdowns, and again, getting back to playoff production in the NFC championship game that year against the Vikings, five for 85 with two touchdowns. And he had at least 60 receiving yards

in every playoff game that year. So that was a bigger swing than some of the other ones we'll talk about, but that combination of hitting on one big swing, hitting on a couple of the marginal guys to fill out certain position groups, that's a build that I think will come up again here. When you combine one of those bigger hits

with some of the other ones that just vastly outperformed what they were supposed to do based on the contracts. And they signed, I think, Tori Smith, that off-season, who gave them a little bit more catch-and-run juice than obviously Al-Shahn was going to give them. So even that was like another one of those

smaller ones that they were able to hit on. 2018 is a really interesting one. Because again, we get the Patriots here. And there is one that was not a free agent signing, but kind of fits what we're talking about here. They traded for Jason McCordy that offseason the 2018 Patriots did for next to nothing. It was like a late round pick swap.

He gives them a thousand snaps at corner. So one of those final bring the group together defensive back signings or moves. And then you go to the 2018 Rams. and this is a much more complicated discussion because there was a huge influx of veteran talent on the 2018 Rams, but almost all of it was through traits.

So they signed Indyaman Suu for one year of $14 million. Again, 60 pressures for Indama can Sue that year, played 1100 snaps. But then they traded for Akim Taleb, Marcus Peters, Brandon Cooks, and they also traded for Dante Fowler. So a ton of guys came over that year. It was mid-season.

So it wasn't quite as important as the other ones, but this is one of those examples, and we'll talk about it again with the 2021 Rams, where if you want to get a little bit aggressive in one single off-season, the Rams have done this twice where they've really chased some veteran pieces either in off-season or over the course of a season,

the way they did with Von Miller and OBJ, and that helps them get over the top or at least get close to the finish line here. I think in doing this exercise, this was the Super Bowl year, I feel like you should take the least amount of lessons from because you have the Rams trading everything for all of these players. And they were able to do that in part because they had just hit on this young superstar

offensive coach where a lot of other teams weren't running their offense this way. They'd revived Jared Goss' career pretty suddenly. They had Todd Gurley, who was like still impressive. Like they just had this really kind of special confluence of factors that and they were able to be so aggressive with some of the trades. that it kind of just ended up working out for them. I don't know how much of this is really replicable. This just doesn't feel like something you can chase.

And then on the other side, the Patriots, I think I said this on one of our recent shows, this 2018 Patriots team is one of the, like, it's a Super Bowl team you can't take that many lessons from in terms of the way they did it. The offense wasn't even that good. And then the defense was a lot of guys they already had, and it was a Belichick defense.

Like, it's very unique in the way that they run it. And then, yeah, offensively, like, This was a super low-scoring game. The Patriots offense was like a run-first offense for a lot of the year. They didn't have any pass catchers. It was a – this year in particular, a very bizarre year in the NFL in terms of who got to the end. It was very strange. I think in some ways, though, that Rams team is kind of similar to the 2015 Broncos team

and that a lot of the big free agent moves that they made that were important in building the roster that they did actually happened the year before because that was when they signed Robert Woods. they signed Andrew Whitworth and they signed Sammy Watkins in that 2017 year as well. So a lot of the free agent moves that they made that kind of changed

the complexion of their offense happened the year before and then they made some of those bigger trades and that included the Brandon Cooks deal that we're talking about kind of adding that vertical piece

because then in 2018 you had Woods, you had Cooper Cup and you had Brandon Cooks and they all had those roles within that 11 personnel offense that really started to make a lot of sense.

And so I agree with you in that this Rams team is kind of weird, but I think the takeaway here is there are moments where some of that aggressiveness in the veteran market can be beneficial for you as a way to kind of take things over the top. The 2017 Rams were exciting. They were good. There was proof of concept we kind of understood what the McVeigh era would feel like. And then they spent the 2018 offseason being like, what can we do to kind of push this thing into a whole new level? They did it in a more aggressive way than most teams do,

but they mostly accomplished what they were getting at there. Yeah, it was, that's, that's the only thing is that I just, I can't imagine many teams will be that aggressive again. That felt like a once in a lifetime type of team. So we go to 28, 2019,

kind of similar to what we were talking about with the Rams, where you have a young cost-controlled quarterback that you feel good about, what can we do to kind of push this into a new direction? So that 2019 Chiefs team, that was the team that signed Tyron Mavis. to a huge deal in the offseason, three years, $42 million.

They traded for Frank Clark that year, gave him a massive extension, and then they traded Eric Murray for Emmanuel Agba. So for the most part, those were the bigger moves that that Chiefs team made. But again, a combination of Agua being like a smaller move and then something like the Matthew thing being where you can shop at the top of the market. And every once in a while, that sort of free agent signing is very big in getting you from point A to point B. the Matthew thing to me is a very good example of exactly that.

And they signed Alex Okle for that offseason, who was another like, you know, edge three, edge four guy. But the fact that they, you remember right before this period is when they had Tom Bahali and Justin Houston. So they were kind of scrambling to like fully retool this room. And in this particular off season, even though they didn't necessarily hit on a star, I guess Frank Clark was like close-ish at the time. But like the fact that they were able to so retool it, kind of topped the last. bottom in the room. I thought that was really, really smart. And then they also went out and signed Damien Wilson that offseason, who was like a league average linebacker. But you also have to remember, too, beforehand they had guys like Derek Johnson. And the end of his career, they were

kind of scrambling to figure out what they wanted to do at linebacker when he kind of faded out. And so for them to go and get just a guy who could be competent. And I think they had signed maybe Anthony Hitchens the year before. So they had finally gotten some degree of stability in the room there. So them just like doing something about the front seven. when it had been so, so bad for them for the past couple of years when they were trying to figure out how to make up for some of these veterans leaving, they did a really good job in that sense. And then, yeah, when you have the quarterback on the other side being as much as being as

good as he was and some of the other young players they had there, all they needed was something on defense to not ruin it for them. The Frank Clark move in overall, I don't know if I'd call it a mistake because they ended up winning a Super Bowl the year that they did it. But if you look at the ROI on what they invested in the thought, in the Frank Clark trade, it probably wasn't worth it when you throw in the draft picks plus the contract. But in this year specifically, again, we talk about that secondary piece along the defensive line that can get you 65 pressures and come up big in the most important games of the year. Frank Clark, in the playoffs that year, 10 pressures in the divisional round, that crazy comeback game, he had 10 pressures in three sacks per PFF.

He had four pressures in a sack in the conference championship game. He had three pressures in a sack in the Super Bowl against the Niners that year. So they paid a lot to get it, but trying to find that secondary or tertiary option for your pass rush in that single offseason as a way to take your defense from one level to the next, that does come up as we look at these teams over the course of the last 10 years or so. The Niners that year in 2019, this is a very fun one. This is mostly a our in-house drafted players baked for long enough and in the right combination to get us to this moment. Because if you look at that 2019 Niners team, that was the year where Jimmy played a full year after only playing three games in 2018, right? And so the offense really had no shot the year before. One of the reasons part, one of the benefits of the offense having no shot the year before is that team drafted second overall in 2019.

and got to take Nick Bosa with the second pick. He had 100 pressures that year as a rookie. And then they also drafted Debo that year. And if you look at some of the other in-house guys, that 2019 season is where Fred Warner becomes Fred Warner. So then that Niners team is just a little bit different where the injection that really took them to a different place in 2019 was mostly through the draft

and that it was the development of their in-house pieces. Yeah, that was like, they were a team that, every team thinks that they're going to be good, but that team probably ended up being better than they could have even hoped for because they hadn't won more than six games for the past like three or four years. And I know Shanahan had only been there for the one or two before this, but obviously Jimmy gets hurt and then so you don't know what the offense is really going to look like with him. And so they kind of just got lucky that a lot of stuff started to come together for them.

Obviously, like you said, Warner breaks out. They hit on some of their draft picks that year. I do think the only thing that was kind of instructive in what they did is that mid-season, when they realized that they were pretty good, they went out and traded for Emmanuel Sanders to be like, all right, what is the thing that can help us make sure we get over the line and get to where we want to get in the playoffs

now that we realize we're a serious team? And so I don't know if there's that much to take away from this team other than I guess if you think you're close enough and you have the resources to spend a little bit of something in the midseason, it can be worth it to go out and do that. Here's the lesson I would take away from that. We look at the Niners now compared to what the Niners felt like in 2019. team. And there'll be other years. Obviously, they didn't go to the Super Bowl the year that they did this, but they go out and they get Christian McCaffrey. And so there are plenty of examples of them. They might have went to the Super Bowl if Brock Purdy's shoulder doesn't detach. Absolutely. They were a Super Bowl worthy team that year. So there are examples of them kind of jumpstarting things with veteran additions over the next five years or so. But as we look at that 2019 Niners team and we compare that to how the Niners feel now, think about how central the development and success on all those draft picks was to the

the Niners becoming what they became from 2019 through 2023, and then think about how that entire era of draft picks that led to it, that doesn't exist for this version of the team. Because they didn't have those first round picks and because the draft halls have been so much more underwhelming, what fueled the version of the Niners that we got to watch over the last five years doesn't really exist for the version of the Niners we're going to be trying, we're going to try to watch over the next five years. makes sense. Like Iyuk is a hit, but for the most part, because the picks didn't exist, that influx of draft talent and what the 2019 Niners felt like, what that team felt like, it's just

going to be hard to replicate that again because we haven't had the same draft success. They were a young upstart explosive team with a lot of those guys that they had drafted in that one or two year window before this time, or even obviously during that year. All of the same pillars of the team are basically guys they just. drafted in that era and it's not a whole lot of new other than like you said brand and iuk being a pretty good hit for them 2020 is a very weird year right so you look at the bucks you look at the bucks the bucks signs tom brady in 2020 that's very helpful and that's you combine that with they hit on tristan whirfs in the draft that year some of the smaller moves that they made and some of the

the more impactful moves that they made from a veteran addition perspective actually happened the previous year right so they go out and they sign shack barrett for next to nothing before the 2019 season. They tag him going into 2020. And then the JPP trade that they made had happened a couple years prior. That ends up becoming very important. So for the 2020 bucks dropping Tom Brady into an otherwise pretty good roster, that's most of the story here.

So when we're talking about free agents or veteran additions, period, going out and having a quarterback who can play at an MVP level for an entire season or even for a short stretch, that is very helpful as part of this. But I don't think that's really a lesson we can take from it because those guys aren't hanging around the open market very often. No, the best quarterback playing, some of his best ball still at like 42 years old

or whatever he was at the time, that guy doesn't really exist anymore. I know the Jets tried it with Aaron Rogers and you see how hard it is to thread that needle. And then on the other side, the chief's like, the same team as the year before. Yeah, and sometimes that's what happens, right? They just didn't have to add anybody.

That team won the Super Bowl the year before. They get decimated by injuries along the offensive line. That's one of the reasons they don't win it again in 2020. They have to remake the entire offensive line in 2021 as a result and kind of overcorrect. But the Brady thing is funny because that move and what happened with Brady in 2020 and then it would happen with Stafford the next year set off a series of events almost yearly for the next three or four years with teams going out and trying to find their version. version of this. The Broncos try to do it with Russell Wilson, the Jets try to do it with Aaron

Rogers. I'm sure there will be another team this offseason that tries to talk themselves into Rogers being a path to doing it again. So the fact that it worked with both Brady and Stafford, I think, has led to some missteps over the past few years with teams trying to recapture whatever that build feels like. I wonder how many years it's going to take before we fully get away from like that, okay, that Brady Super Bowl was so long enough away. The Stafford's Super Bowl was long enough away that we don't need to keep trying that anymore. I mean, I think, honestly, there's probably a little bit of Derek Carr and Kirk Cousins being that for some teams where they're looking at and being like, oh, man, if we get the right guy in

here, like, what can it do for us? And I think they probably paid a premium each of those teams to do that because they were seeking out that sort of model that had worked in 2020 and 2021, both of those years. Yeah, that's a good point. All right, before we move on, let's take one more quick break. Let's go to 2021. This is a very good example of how you can benefit from the veteran guys you added in a single offseason. I mean, the Bengals built their defense in 2021 with guys that they added through free agency. Trey Hendrickson signs like a mid-tier sort of deal, $15 million a year.

That sort of general range is going to come up the following season as well with Hassan Reddick. Mike Hilton signs a pretty solid free agent deal. Chudobie Awosier signs a pretty solid free agent deal. And if you look at it, this was a two-year process for the Bengals because they had done similar things the year before when they signed DJ Reader and Von Bell to pretty solid free agent contracts. So we're talking about like six, seven starters on that Bengals defense that were signed for not cheap free agent deals. And that's essentially how they remade that entire unit. So what the Broncos did in 2014 into 2015 was like the Gucci version of Can We Buy a Super Bowl defense? This was like the, we're going to Walmart and buying a Super Bowl caliber defense.

It wasn't great, but it got the job done pretty much across the board. I mean, like, Hilton ended up being really good for them, obviously. Hendrickson was good in New Orleans. And it really felt like he kind of took his game to a different level when he got to Cincinnati. So that was a huge hit for them. And then Chidobie Uzi, what have we talked about pretty much every other year that we've looked at this now? A lot of these teams just hit on one cornerback who's not great, but it's like, okay, he gives a solid corner to play. That's all we needed.

And for him to do that there, like they just hit on a lot of guys that it made so much sense. And a lot of these guys are very smart players. Like Mike Hilton is a very smart player. DJ Reeder, you watch the way that, you know, obviously they signed him the year before,

but he's a very, very smart defensive player. Von Bell giving him what he gave them at safety in Lou Anerumo's defense, them signing him the year before. Like, just the very, with how complicated Anorumo's defense can be, it felt like they went out and picked a lot of the right guys. And that's kind of another thing.

I thought about with this team too. That's 100% the case. And I think one of the reasons they've struggled over the last couple of years is they thought they had the right veteran pieces on the back end or when they were trying to incorporate younger players at safety specifically, they just haven't had that same level of cohesion.

And so they've tried to do certain stuff, it just hasn't hit in the way that it did with that 2021 team. And the comparison I would make, it's almost like a counterfeit, right? Like if you have a really well-made, like, fake watch or purse, most people aren't going to notice the difference unless you're really looking for it.

That's what this is. This is like the Canal Street version of the 2015 Broncos offense what this Bengals team did. And then the last one that's worth mentioning here, they traded for BJ Hill that offseason. Right before the season started, they did that deal where they traded Billy Price

for BJ Hill. In the moment, I didn't really think about it. I was just kind of like, one team's trash for another team's trash. Like, why does this matter? And I was very wrong about it. that. B.J. Hill played 700 snaps for that 2021 team. He had 40 pressures. He eventually signed an extension

with the Bengals. So you're looking at it. We're talking about like 6, 7, 8 free agent or veteran additions for this team over the course of calendar year on that side of the ball that ended up really reshaping what they were capable of and took them to the doorstep of actually winning that Super Bowl. It was literally like the whole defense outside of the linebackers and Jesse Bates. They pretty much rebuilt the entire thing. And Sam Hubbard.

Yeah, Sam Hubbard. Those are like the only guys who were actually in-house pieces. So this is like the best possible example of it. We get to the Rams that year and this is another one where it's just like, what the fuck am I supposed to do with this? I don't know what I'm supposed to take from a team trading for. One of the most, like an incredibly talented quarterback who was doomed to whatever Detroit had been for the past 25 years.

You get him. So capable of a hot rug. Yes. Like a quarterback who was so primed for getting hot. for a Super Bowl run that is like the perfect example of that type of player. And we'd finally started to see it

even before he got traded to the Rams with the Darrell Bevel years. It was like, ooh, this is actually kind of what Stafford looks like in a well put together offense. And like the Darryl Bevel offense wasn't great, but it was above the line for what Stafford had had for a majority of his career.

And then you get to supercharge it with a guy like McVeigh. And again, it's just like, how many times are we going to, how many other instances in the league are we going to have Superstar offensive coordinator like a top five, six guy in terms of play callers, and then a veteran quarterback who we can go out and get who,

at the time Stafford was, what, like 34? Like, how many of those guys are around where you can go and trade any amount of capital for them? So, like, it's just, again, a very rare scenario where if you can thread that, and you'll go for it, but there's not going to be that many opportunities to even do this. This is kind of similar to the Brady conversation where, yes, adding the right quarterback in the offseason

is the best way to change. what your team feels like. Not every team has that option every single offseason. But again, similar to what they did in 2018, there were some important veteran additions through the trade market that end up being pretty transformative for this team. They go out and trade for Von Miller in midseason.

They signed OBJ to a million dollar deal in November because he was coming off of injury. And they traded for Sony Michelle, who ended up becoming their leading rusher in the back half of that year, even though that rushing offense was pretty hard to watch for the most part. So this is, again, a team

I mean, it's the whole fuck them picks thing that becomes something where they were able to get away from it. I don't necessarily think it's a set of lessons you learn if you were a team trying to build a Super Bowl contender. The only thing I think that is maybe instructive here is that the OBJ signing in terms of particular skill set they needed in the offense where we're going to do a ton of dropback, it's going to be down the field.

We need somebody who can run the backside dig. Okay, well, you went out and found the guy, the one guy who was on the market who can go do it. it. And so that was pretty good foresight by them. But other than that, it was, yeah, when you, when you get fortunate to land that type of quarterback, that'll do most of the heavy lifting here. The 2022 chiefs actually fit pretty nicely into some of the other teams that we've talked about here, where it's this combination of certain types of signings. It reminds me in a lot of ways of what they did the Tyron Matthew year. They go out, they replace Tyron Matthew with Justin Reed, three years,

31 million. They go out and get juju for one year 3.8 million. They sign MVS to like a bigger contract than I remember. It was three years and 30 million. This was one of the most surprising things I saw when we were doing this entire exercise of like looking okay, how much did this team pay for this guy, this guy? There are a couple of surprising contracts in here, but MVS signing for three years, 30 million dollars. I was like, man, good for him. This is actually interesting though, because I think this reminds me, you look at a lot of these different teams and what they felt like in the moment and what those Frasian Halls looked like. And there are plenty of examples of teams making a splashy signing or a more expensive signing at a position and that actually not being the most impactful one that they had. And I think you could make that argument for the 22 chiefs.

They go on sign MVS to that contract, but it was actually Juju who had the big year for them. Juju for $3 million that year had 9333 yards and 78 catches. So signing that guy in the $2 to $4 million range that ends up out producing that by like 2 or 3x, that does feel like the most important thing you can do in a single free agency period if you're a team that's trying to win a championship. The big money guys are great. We're going to have our Matthews. We're going to have our Justin Reeds.

We're going to have our Alex Max. but getting your version of Juju or Zach Bonn or Patrick Robinson, all of those guys, those are the ones that as I go through all of this are probably going to stick with me the most. Yeah, and Juju was good for the reason of being two of like, so this was the year they traded Tyree Kill, obviously, and they wanted to be more of an underneath offense, like, you know, play a little bit safer,

make sure we can move the ball, all this sort of stuff, timing, beating zone, all that stuff. Ju-Ju for as inexplosive as maybe he was and maybe not the best one-on-one man-beater, he was awesome at playing the middle of the field, sifting through zones, making sure he could catch the ball. He was the perfect receiver

for what Patrick Mahomes needed in his development as a player in that moment. And so that again was like, okay, not a sexy player to go and sign, but it was very, very good understanding of exactly what the team needed. If you look at the Eagles that year, again, this is like a fun combination of signings.

go out and sign Hassan Reddick on a three-year deal that's pretty much in line with the Trey Hendrickson deal. So pass rushers in this mold, three years, 45-ish million, 15 a year, where you're paying them essentially half of what the top of the market is making, or at this point probably, I don't know, 60%, 65% of what the top of the market is making. But they feel like true number one pass rushers, given the complexion of the rest of your team. Both Redick and Hendrickson with that over a two-year period. They signed Kaiser White for $3 million. Again, that kind of stopgap starter contract that we're talking about.

And then the other one, and this one, I think you'd actually take a little bit wider, that 2022 Eagles team signed James Bradbury for one year and $7 million. This is something that I do think we can do. You buy the dip on corners, right? So finding the year where the corner that used to be a really good player or had been given a lot of money. So James Bradbury signs a monster free agent deal with. the Giants, eventually gets cut by the Giants as they're retooling, because cornerback can play can be so volatile from season to season, if you get the guy on the down swing and he plays like

he did when he got that big contract, that ends up becoming very, very useful here. And I think the secondary pieces specifically are where you see a lot of examples of that. And I think corner is one of those spots too where it can be the rest of the defense is bad, therefore the corner becomes bad. And I think Bradbury kind of fell into that where like so much around him started to fall apart that it was just like, eh, this isn't really working. And then they went into that offseason and said, okay, you know what, we're going to try to redo this thing entirely. We're going to get this guy out of here. And again, the Eagles have done a very good job typically of buying the dip on certain guys. And this was about as good a job as they had done, obviously until this past year, which we'll

talk about in a minute with Zach Bond. But Bradbury was a really, really good job in that sense. And then to me, honestly, too, I thought Kaiser White was a really good signing. He was a bad player before he got. You still love Kaiser White. I like him now. I really did not like him before this Eagles year. I thought he was bad. Like, he couldn't take on contact.

I thought his coverage stuff was overrated. I thought he was purely a run-in-chase guy. But they signed him this year and he became more than that. Like, he really stepped up as a player. And so maybe that was them just doing really good pro scouting and then being able to coach him in certain ways that he had maybe not been before when he was in L.A. I don't know what it was, but he just did, he took, he hit a different level that year, and that was a really, really good job by them.

Let's get to 2023. I also love these combinations here, especially for the 2023 chiefs and how we're looking at this. So they go out, they give Juan Taylor a monster contract to presumably play left tackle for them. He doesn't end up playing left tackle for them. I forgot about this whole debacle, by the way. So he ends up playing right tackle for them, but they go out and they sign Donovan Smith for one year and $3 million, and I think you could make an argument, not even just throw like the overall quality of play who was better in 2023 out the window.

Getting Dottovan Smith for $3 million, I think you could make a very serious argument. That was more important for the 2023 Chiefs title chances than signing Joanne Taylor for $20 million a year was. Absolutely. I think it absolutely. I mean, obviously, you probably needed both with how bad the offensive line had been at certain points beforehand, but like absolutely getting Donovan Smith for effectively nothing relative to what left tackles can get paid, and especially too, because quality left tackles

don't hit the market. So for them to get anybody who could play left tackle was like, it just doesn't happen. It was a very rare thing for them to hit on. And that's why they had to give Juan Taylor $20 million to presumably move from right tackle to left tackle because those guys are never available on the free agent market. But so the Juwant Taylor thing, we can argue against the, we can argue. about the efficacy of that, right? Like, it's probably an overpay.

What they're paying him against the cap right now is probably limiting them in a way that's worth paying attention to. But the other signings I do think that are worth mentioning that year that are probably more telling are the smaller ones. We talked about Donovan Smith, but two other ones here. They signed Mike Edwards to a $3 million deal. He paid 800 snaps for them that season. So again, just trying to add pieces that are cost controlled and cheap to your stable of

defensive backs in a given year. And then the one that I think is very telling about what that team felt like in 2023 and how they were remaking their identity overall, going to get Drew Tranquil for $3 million in that 20203 off season and have that converge with what Chanel was becoming, I think you started to feel this shift in like the identity and feel of that defense. Some of it was on the back end and a corner and guys like Logerius Sneed, you know, evolving and developing as in-house draft picks,

but what tranquil became as part of that overall equation at linebacker with Chanel and the fact that they did it for $3 million, that feels like some of the other signings that we've talked about here and kind of feels like their version of the Bond signing for that year, even if he didn't play quite to that level. Yeah, because I think the year before it was like one of the Neiman's, I don't remember which one I think it might have been Ben, who was playing linebacker for them.

And so for them to go get Tranquil, who, again, I mean, probably only like, maybe even a slightly below league average starter at the time. I think he got better actually the following season and started playing better this year. But like that year, he just gave them, it's kind of what we've talked about. When you go from bad to just a guy who can give us something and clearly has a role on the defense, I think that went a long way for them. And two, Trankle was just a vet, whereas, like, that was a very young linebacker room with not just Leo Channall, but like Nick Bolton.

And Nick Bolton was playing well, but he was still a very young player. And so I think to have a guy in Trankle who was a little bit older, a little bit more experienced to come in and help them along, I think was, again, another shrewd signing by them. If you look at the 2023-9ers that year, they, for multiple seasons in a row, had some big injections of free agent talent and just veteran talent and some big investments. So they go out, they sign Traverius Ward

and trade for Christian McCaffrey in 2022. And then in the 2023 off-season, they go out and they signed Javon Hargrave to a big money-free agent deal. He finishes with 65 pressures that year. they also traded for Chase Young in the middle of that season. So over a two-year period, that Niners team was very dependent on the right and at times big money veteran additions, whether that was through the trade market or through free agency.

Because again, they had not been drafting all that well outside of when they had, you know, back in 2017, 2018, 2019, that would, some of those classes were really good. But in that period between then and this class, they didn't have a whole lot of that. That's why you had to go get a Javon Hargrave to make sure your defense that was built explicitly on getting home with four could get home with four. That's why you made sure you went out and got the trade for Trace Young. It was like, so I think in terms of understanding why their roster worked, they made a lot of the right moves.

But part of it, too, was them having to make those moves because they just weren't drafting all of that, all that well at the time, which on another sense, it's kind of amazing they even continue to get this far with how tough some of their drafts were over that spend. Well, I think that, like, the McAfree thing. That's how you're using your draft capital, right? And then part of the other reason that we don't talk that much about the draft capital is what Purdy became for them in lieu of what Tray Lance was supposed to become for them. But now, as you look at this roster, I think you're starting to feel the absence of those draft picks, especially in the Tray Lance trade. So let's round this out with the 2024 Eagles and Chiefs.

I mean, we talked so much about this Chiefs or this Eagles team and what they did in Free Agency. I don't think we have to spend a lot of time on this. I think this is more about comparing some of the signings they made with the ones that we just talked about from the previous decade and just kind of how they fall into some of those buckets. The Saquan move feels a little bit like those, you know, not high, high-end free agent signings. We don't really see that, right? Like if you're signing a guy that is making top five money at the position or is like the biggest free agent of that entire class, that isn't really present in a lot of these teams who

end up going to Super Bowls. It's usually like those tier two guys. If you're going to have one of those, that can be part of this equation. That's what Seekwon was. And then you have your crazy value signing in Zach Bonn and what he did for them. And then Mackay Bechtin feels a little bit like the Michael Ower, Donovan Smith versions of these signings where you already have a solid group. You needed one starter.

Can you get him at the right price? And that's kind of what Mackay Bechtin was for this team this year. And even Sequin, you mentioned, you know, there's not a whole lot of these. You pay a super big ticket guy who's making top. five position at his top five money at his position. The Barclay thing is just so unique, though, because we just weren't paying that many running backs period. And it was a very rare time where a superstar running back did hit the market. And like, it just, it was such a, just a very smart thing by the Eagles again. We've said this before, but like for them to buy the dip, you know,

we mentioned, you know, what was it three years ago on when they made a Super Bowl in 2022. They bought the dip on Bradbury. In this class, they bought the dip on an entire position and went out and signed the best guy in Saquan Barkley. Yeah, and I think that's really important. It's like, how are these assets a little bit distressed, right? Like, how can you make sure you're not paying sticker prices for the guys that you're signing in free agency in order to get yourself over the top? And so I guess that brings me to how we'll wrap this up.

What to you are the most important takeaways from this sort of exercise? Like the central question at the top of this podcast, how can free agency help you win a Super Bowl. After going through this, what do you think your kind of truncated answer to that would be? I think to me, probably the biggest takeaway, and this doesn't apply to necessarily every team here, but most of the teams that are ready to go to the Super Bowl have the pillars. They have the stars that they need. You have your superstar quarterback. You have maybe a star pass rush, or maybe it's a star receiver, one star corner, whatever it is, guys that you can build the thing around, you just need to build around them with these $4 million signings here, a two-for, you know, $10 million signing here,

just guys that can give you enough to make sure that you're getting the most out of your star players. That to me is what you see with a lot of these rosters where they just have the foresight of like, okay, we need to plug this hole, not with some fancy $20 million signing and go get the best guy, but just a guy who can give us enough here and make sure that he's going to do his job. I think that's right. And if you look at it, it reminds me the conversation we had last year around the Titans in Free Agency. And when I was looking at what the Titans were doing in Free Agency, my takeaway from that and my first response to that was,

which good team does this? It's a good question. Right, give me the example of a good team that does this. And there are a couple, right? But the Bengals, for the most part, signed mid-tier guys that were on their second contracts. What the Titans didn't felt different than that to me. And the Broncos maybe are a team.

They spent a lot of money in free agency to make this thing happen. but I do think that operating the way that the Titans did last year, there just aren't that many good teams who look at free agency as that sort of tool. If you're going to have a big ticket item, that's fine, but it should be one big ticket item for the most part. And again, it's in that kind of second tier of free agent signings. Usually, as we look at the way that free agency is weaponized to get teams to the Super Bowl, it's hitting on those guys on shorter-term deals that just vastly outperform expectations.

Like, what is your version of Zach Bonn or Patrick Robinson or Michael O'er or Donovan Smith, finding that right piece to kind of make the rest of a unit makes sense and where you're getting tons of surplus value from that sort of signing? Those are the ones that ultimately are going to shape Super Bowl caliber seasons. So we're going to talk a lot about in the next couple weeks of these big money guys, the guys are going to get paid at the top of the market. And there are plenty of examples of one guy in that sort of tier helping a team that's trying to win a Super Bowl. But just as often or more often, it's the guys that you're getting for cheap that for whatever reason, in your system surrounded by your talent, at that stage of their career, you're hitting on a guy at the right time. And those are the ones that are probably going to be more important in the long run.

After doing this, I'm excited now to, when we get to the end of the free agency period, when it's starts to die down, look at all of the playoff teams from this year, and look at all of the guys, those teams signed for, you know, $6 million and be like, okay, which of these little pieces do I think might be the ones that are going to

take the next step? And obviously, it's incredibly hard to pick. You don't know who the Zach Bond is going to be. That's impossible to define. Oh, but we're going to try to guess. I promise you, we're going to try to guess. So as we think about that and just projecting forward a little bit, and think about the next two weeks of the show here.

We're going to do a combine preview with Dan and just talk about what he's going to be watching in Indianapolis. We're going to be bringing you guys shows from Indie all of next week. Those are going to be team-centric shows. I love the fact that all of our beatwriters are in the same place for a few days. So we're going to be doing something we actually did a couple of other off-seasons ago. We're going to do the most interesting teams of the 2025 off-season as our set of shows from Indianapolis. So we're going to be talking to, you know, a dozen beat writers and what those team offseasons might look like. Teams that are on the precipice, teams that have a ton of offseason capital, whether it's draft capital and free agency, teams that have a lot of sliding doors moments potentially this offseason.

So we're going to be digging into a third, almost half of the league as part of those discussions. So we're going to be doing that next week. And then the following week, the week of March 3rd, that's when we're going to be doing sort of our free agency preview stuff. and you best believe that as part of those conversations, I'm going to be asking you on both sides of the ball, who are your Zach Bonds this year? Because I think anecdotally from what this season felt like and then going through this exercise,

those are going to be the guys we should probably spend more time talking about as we think about the free agency halls for these teams and how far they can actually go and helping you win a championship. It's going to be fun because I don't know how much I've ever thought about it exactly in these terms, but the more you look at these Super Bowl teams, those are the guys who put you over the line.

So I think it's going to be a fun time. I hope you guys enjoyed that. That was a little bit of like a Remembersome Guys show, which I always enjoy doing every so often. And again, this is like to me like a kind of weird spot in the calendar that I always struggle to program, which probably says more about my shortcomings as the person tasked with driving the creed part of this podcast.

But that's what we landed on today. I enjoyed it. I hope you guys did as well. We will be back on Friday chatting with Dane and Derek. about their thoughts as we head to Indy for what is going to be my 17th Combine? Oh, man. I think 16th.

2009 is the first year that I went. And so I started going in college because Missou had guys that were going. And I was writing a story about Jeremy Mackle in that year at Missou. It was like a big feature. And so I just drove myself to the combine. They credentialed anyone back then, like truly anyone.

And so I got one through like, I remember like filling out the credential form. And like I was like, I'm from the, I'm from the Columbia, Missouri and like, you know, whatever. And putting it in just being like, I hope they say yes to my credential. Like I was 20. You know, I got absolutely no clue what I was doing or what was going on. And so I remember when I got the approval request from the credentialing process from the combine, it was like a huge moment for me. And now you don't even have to do it yourself. How about that? Now, I haven't done it myself in 10 years. I haven't submitted my own credentials in a very long time, but I used to.

And that was a very big moment. So it's an event I have a lot of affection for. It is a time in the calendar I have a lot of affection for. I'm very much looking forward to getting back to India and spending time with some folks and especially the people that work for us. So those be ready or conversations are going to be coming your guys as way. Next week, we will chat with Dane on Friday. For now, that is all we've got. I sincerely appreciate you guys listening. We'll talk to you very soon.