How to Survive NFL Free Agency
There are lots of important things happening in the world today. I’m not paying attention to any of them. Today is a holiday for me, and many other American sports addicts.
NFL free agency technically begins today at 4 p.m. ET, but deals can be struck as early as noon. That’s when junkies like me will be on Twitter. For most sports fans it’s the third or fourth most important day of the year, behind Christmas and the draft but ahead of relatives’ birthdays and Thanksgiving. Thanks to rank corruption and volume lying, it’s fast become one of the funnier metaphors for the American experience.
NFL teams have always been prohibited from contacting players still under contract, but about fifteen years ago the league began to be embarrassed by the phenomenon of $50 million deals being magically completed minutes into the new league year. Teams and agents weren’t just ignoring rules and talking before it was allowed, they were being dickish and showy about it. In response, the NFL in 2012 instituted what I believe is the first permitted cheating mechanism in pro sports history, a thing called the “legal tampering period,” sanctioning the illegal chatter.
Thirteen years later, deals are now somehow completed at the start of the tampering period, which means the league will soon have to create a second legal cheating window, then maybe a third, and so on. I predict we’ll eventually have a “legal tortious interference” period that begins somewhere around week 9 of the regular season.
The NFL markets its product in the offseason by encouraging hurricanes of rumors and innuendo about player movement, roughly 2095% of which will turn out to be bull. There are two species of NFL lies: those told by teams, and those told by agents. Learning to distinguish these is central to the fan experience on free agency day. A quick field guide for enjoying the NFL’s annual festival of Fake News and Agentensprache, or “Agent-Speak”:
