Free agency round-up

Player mentions

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The tampering period before free agency officially opens is always a wild few days, as we get a million deals reported that were clearly agreed to before the tampering period. But also, nothing can be finalized. There’s also the element of deadlines spurring action, so get trades layered on top of the free agent deals, and a combination of these things led to that huge Maxx Crosby trade falling through, which had reverberations around the league. There’s just so much happening right away, and then each day there’s more, though it does trail off. As always, I love to throw out some early responses to this stuff, mostly from a vibes perspective of how well I think the teams are doing and how different players could fit. That stuff is especially important in a 2026 where scheme is more important than ever , and more than half the league’s teams have major coaching changes at the coordinator or head coach levels. Some of these teams going a new direction are going to fall flat on their faces! Last year’s post opened with a note about the work the Bears did in the trenches on both sides of the ball, which wound up being a key observation in a 2025 season where they went from worst to first in the NFC North. Last year’s post also famously questioned the way Seattle was building, something I’ve spent the past year unpacking as they have been a fascinating microcosm of everything happening around the league. There were some other valuable hits, a few of which were about veterans as bad fits that feel obvious in hindsight, which is what happens when you look back at correct analysis with the benefit of a hindsight where we saw that analysis play out as accurate. There was more that was quite humbling, and the misses do just feel more jarring because it’s like, “Well that sounds absurd, how could you have even considered that?” We’re always biased by the things we do see — it’s basically impossible to control the results-based elements of your brain, and keep from putting extra weight on the outcomes that did occur than they deserve in terms of how likely things were to have gone that way either beforehand or even after we learned the specifics. Anyway, I don’t think today’s post is going to have a bunch of answers, and as always, I don’t want to get anchored to early offseason analysis. I like doing content this time of year, but I realize that a lot of people consuming it are already drafting in a major way, and they want finalized takes. I try to bridge that gap, but my obligation will always be to accuracy, and broadly my belief is especially this early that should take the form of emphasizing uncertainty. But here are some of the things I have thought about most strongly over the past week. You can also hear Shawn and I discuss several of the early free agency moves on this week’s episode of Stealing Bananas . Trade discussions add weight to suggestions the NFL is down on this rookie class This isn’t directly related to fantasy as it’s more about depth across all the positions, but DJ Moore fetching the 2026 second-round pick both reeked of a bit of desperation from Buffalo, and also felt like a tacit admission the WR answer Buffalo was seeking wasn’t going to be available in this draft, where they wanted to be able to take him. Then the Maxx Crosby agreement landed, and the Ravens were hit pretty hard publicly about the cost being two first-round picks, and that perception of paying too much in some ways probably informed the responses tha…