You’re a smart football fan, so you know: Good NFL teams do not throw cash around during free agency. They build through the draft.
The Patriots were always held up as the golden example of that rule. They drafted good players that fit their system and then filled in the blanks with castoffs from other teams, spotted by Bill Belichick’s keen eye for misused talent.
This was the formula for a dominant run that lasted two decades and shaped so much of how we think about the NFL. The idea that spending in free agency is bad is greatly influenced by survival bias. The teams that have drafted well re-sign their homegrown talent and don’t have the cap space or need to participate in free agency. The teams that don’t draft well don’t have any good homegrown talent to re-sign so they have plenty of cap space and needs to necessitate participating in free agency. So then we look back and say, Oh, these teams were good and built through the draft, and these other bad teams built through free agency, so obviously there is a right (and wrong) way to do things.
So maybe it’s not that bad teams are bad because they spend in free agency. Rather, bad teams spend in free agency because they are bad.
Or, in other words, good teams don’t spend in free agency because they don’t need to. The Patriots did not need to.
Except Belichick has now upended everything by being the most aggressive GM in the early days of free agency, and we’re left wondering what has changed. Have the Patriots’ drafting woes made them into a bad team that must resort to this? Or has Belichick changed his strategy?
The answer is: It’s complicated, but everyone is overreacting to all of this anyway (that never happens in NFL free agency!)
It’s true that the Patriots have been famously bad at drafting for a few years now and have money available because they haven’t had their own players to sign — and because Tom Brady left in free agency after the 2019 season. Belichick admitted last year that it was a reset season and acknowledged that his roster had a number of weaknesses to address … and he has certainly addressed them.
You know the signings by now: Tight ends Hunter Henry and Jonnu Smith got two of the bigger contracts. Matthew Judon and the returning Kyle Van Noy instantly upgraded the edges of the front seven while Davon Godchaux and Henry Anderson were brought in to bolster the league’s worst run defense. And then there were the head-scratchers: CB Jalen Mills, WR Kendrick Bourne and WR Nelson Agholor.
By the end of the first day, Bill Belichick had already broken his own personal record for guaranteed money handed out. It was shocking. The Patriots had lost their way. They were always the team that sat out of early free agency while all the plebes of the league jumped on the overpriced scraps.
As we moved onto the next story — Did you see the Bears signed Andy Dalton LMAO? — the breakdowns of those deals quietly leaked out … and it turned out the initial tweets announcing the deals (the ones that are basically written by agents as advertisements to potential clients) were a bit misleading. The deals New England offered were not all that cumbersome.
The total combined cap hit of those signings amounted to one Kirk Cousin (singular). Henry and Smith got good paydays for tight ends. But Judon basically got the same deal Trey Hendrickson got after his flukey season (and is a much better player). Mills’ reported four-year, $26 million is really a two-year, $11 million deal, which feels right for him. Bourne is being paid like a WR4, which, yeah, that makes sense. Anderson and Godchaux will combine for a cap hit of about $7 million, which is lower than Todd Gurley’s 2021 cap charge for the Rams. Agholor’s deal … well, that’s one I can’t defend (2 years, $11 million AAV).
The Patriots are, for the most part, paying these guys at prices commensurate with the roles they’re all capable of playing.
And before criticize a team for spending in free agency, we should ask: What is that spending precluding the team from doing?
Sure, if you are leaving yourself no money to re-sign some of your better young players, spending in free agency can be bad. Or if you’re spending so much that you’ll need Mickey Loomis-esque tactics to get under the cap, you should probably put the checkbook down.
But what if neither applies? Why, then, is signing a bunch of free agents so bad? You can say “spending just to spend” is bad; but the same can be said about “saving just to save,” right?
I guess what I’m really asking for the purpose of this blog is, what else should the Patriots have done? There’s nobody to re-sign. They have plenty of cap space (and needs to spend it on). Spending now does not do anything to stop them from building up their draft capital (since the best way for Belichick, or anybody, to get out of a drafting lull is to accumulate more picks).
If they weren’t going to spend it in free agency this year, what were they going to do with that money? By the time they’ll need it to re-sign players from future drafts, these contracts will be off the books.
So were they supposed to save it for future free agency classes? Future free agency classes where more teams are going to have money to throw around, which will, theoretically, drive up the prices of the available players?
In a vacuum, most of these deals are reasonable, so it seems that it is just the sheer volume of signing that seems to have people questioning if Belichick has abandoned his tried and true methods of roster construction — maybe as a weird response to Tom Brady winning a Super Bowl without him. I think a simpler explanation makes more sense: Belichick has done what he’s done every offseason. He found good, useful players that will help the Patriots win football games. Only this time he didn’t have to shop in the discount aisle.
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