When it comes to hitting the right notes in free agency, we’ll quote the great baseball manager Casey Stengel, when he heard that a rival manager was trying to win the pennant with just three pitchers: “Well, well, well, I heard it couldn’t be done, but it don’t always work.”
As usual, and on most subjects, Stengel was as correct as he was convoluted in his verbiage. Free agency frequently can’t be done — at least, it frequently can’t be done well — and it don’t always work. Scott Mitchell, Jeff Garcia, Neil O’Donnell, Larry Brown, and Albert Haynesworth are among the most specious free-agent signings in NFL history, and the woebegone transactions have a few common denominators.
Teams often fail by assuming that one-year wonders will continue their peak performances without regression, or that their performances in one big game represent a larger breakout. Teams will also ignore scheme fit, and think that they can fix a player on the decline.
There are all kinds of reasons free-agent signings don’t always work, and here are the free-agency signings we see as the most potentially failure-prone in the 2021 league year.