Fun NFL free-agency week in the books, and we’re covering it from goal line to goal line in this week’s Takeaways. And we have more on the Sam Darnold signing in Seattle. Everything else is here for you …
The Aaron Rodgers-is-washed-up narrative has gone way too far. Is it a little frustrating for the teams involved having to wait on the four-time MVP? Sure. But the New York Giants and Pittsburgh Steelers wouldn’t be waiting for him if it wasn’t worth it—nor would the Minnesota Vikings even consider him.
And this is where we run into the problem.
Saying Rodgers has lost something doesn’t mean he’s lost everything. Those who studied him last year will tell you he hasn’t. Then, they’ll add that while the guy who was once the best quarterback in the league may not be that anymore, he’s still the best available quarterback and, again, certainly worth waiting for.
I talked to one pro scouting director earlier in the month who told me to go back and watch the New York Jets’ Week 15 game against the Jacksonville Jaguars. He said it was all there. Rodgers’s ability to throw and see and think the game at a high level was on that tape. So I took a look, and he wasn’t lying. There were examples where you could see Rodgers couldn’t escape the way he used to, but a lot more where he showed he can still sling it with anyone.
If you weren’t watching, it’s tough to blame you. It was a mid-December game between two 3–10 teams. But go back and look, and I bet you’ll see what I did in the 289-yard, three-touchdown performance that Rodgers gave the Jets in a 32–25 win.
So, then, I wanted to check in with some others who went against him near the end of the year. Opinions did vary. What didn’t was the idea that Rodgers still has something to give.
“He’s on the downside,” said one AFC exec whose team played the Jets late. “He still has the flashes of arm talent and accuracy. There’s a depreciation of the mobility that made him great, when he was that two-way, run/pass option player on every play. It’s relegated him to being more of a pocket-passing veteran. Do I think he can start for a year? I do. … He still sees the field well, has football intelligence, the quick release. His arm’s not quite what it was but with the right surrounding cast? Yes.”
“I think the guy is still a beast,” texted an AFC defensive coach who went against him during that time. “Mentally and arm-talent-wise, he hasn’t dropped off at all. Now, his mobility and athleticism, of course, isn’t the same as it was 10 years ago. [But] if I’m a team and I need a quarterback right now, I don’t hesitate signing him.”
The coach then sent another text, “I would not flinch.”
The AFC exec was a little more measured, in saying, “Know the options are limited, yeah, I would, if I had the right coaches, the OC specifically, the support system. You’d have to consider it.”
Now, there’s certainly a perception out there that last year was indicative of Rodgers’s career careening off the NFL’s freeway and into a ditch. The reality is that, again, while he wasn’t what he had been before, he finished eighth in passing yards (3,897), seventh in touchdown passes (28) and had a middling passer rating (90.5) while enduring a train wreck of circumstances with his head coach and offensive coordinator replaced midseason.
Could it be better in a more stable situation? Since he’s 41 years old, there’s obviously a ceiling on that, but it’s fair to think a motivated Rodgers has one last real run in him.
“There was a time when Aaron was like [Patrick] Mahomes or Josh Allen—when things would break down, he could create with his mobility and athleticism,” the coach continued, via text. “Obviously, at 41, he can’t do that like he used to. But he can still move. He’s not a complete statue back there. And he also might be a little bit more mobile this year, two years removed from the Achilles.”
The Steelers and Giants certainly think so. The Vikings are contemplating it, too.
And that’s not without reason.
Atlanta Falcons
The Falcons should trade Kirk Cousins. We’ve arrived at a checkpoint in this game of Peachtree Pickle that the quarterback is playing with Atlanta management. To me, really, it’s the first of three. So to start, let’s lay those out.
• Sunday: A $10 million roster bonus due in March 2026 vested, becoming fully guaranteed, with the quarterback remaining on the Falcons’ roster on the fifth day of the ’25 league year. Cousins’s $35 million base salary for ’26 is not guaranteed. But it runs the total Atlanta is now responsible for absent a trade, and accounting for his fully guaranteed $27.5 million base salary to $37.5 million.
• April 24-26: Draft weekend, which is the next point that quarterbacking seats will fill up. A team or two would officially take itself out of the market for Cousins. And maybe a team or two would be left desperate for a quarterback of his caliber, if it came out of the first day of the draft without a viable starter.
• Late July: The start of training camp. Cousins doesn’t plan on showing for the offseason program (he may show for mandatory minicamp to avoid taking the fines). So camp is when things could get more uncomfortable. Would this be a situation such as Jimmy Garoppolo’s in the summer of 2022? It’s tough to say. But there’d definitely be some awkwardness. There also could end up being injuries elsewhere that create movement.
I think everyone knows, deep down, that the best thing for everyone would be for Atlanta to get some sort of return on their investment via a trade of Cousins, and for the 36-year-old to get a shot to play somewhere else. The trouble is—and owners can get involved in these things sometimes—where the Falcons put themselves Sunday with that guarantee vesting, so the team no longer has any financial benefit to cut Cousins loose.
Even before Sunday, Atlanta’s brass, including owner Arthur Blank, was basically looking at it as a question of whether it was a better idea to have Cousins for two years at $100 million committed, getting insurance against Michael Penix Jr. for next year as part of the deal, or taking the sunk cost of $90 million committed for the single year (offsets would lower either number a bit in actual dollars). Now, with that extra $10 million guaranteed, cutting Cousins would make zero difference.
That, of course, is looking at things from a pure “asset management” standpoint, something owners often do. The reality is some of the assets here are human beings, and it’s fair to question whether having Cousins around is what’s best for Penix, as Atlanta goes into its first offseason with the eighth pick in last year’s draft entrenched as the starter.
That’s why I still believe the ideal scenario here is for the Steelers or Giants or Cleveland Browns to feel some desperation—be it from the result of the Rodgers sweepstakes or the reality that the Tennessee Titans may just sit tight and take Cam Ward with the first pick—and give the Falcons the chance to “buy” a draft pick by paying down some of Cousins’s 2025 money and flipping Atlanta a pick.
Of course, that got a little tougher to do with Cousins now owed $37.5 million guaranteed.
Stay tuned. This one most certainly ain’t over yet.
Kansas City Chiefs
The Kansas City Chiefs’ restructures get attention every year, but here’s the important thing—they aren’t costing the team’s biggest stars a single cent. More or less, it’s just moving money from one category to another, to give the team breathing room to work around a core that’s well-established and very well-paid.
Since a lot of folks get this stuff confused, I figured this would be a good time to dive in on what exactly Kansas City did with Patrick Mahomes’s and Chris Jones’s contracts earlier this week.
In the simplest terms, the way NFL contracts work, certain bonus money is prorated for cap purposes over the length of a deal (generally those are termed as “signing” bonuses), while other bonuses (most often “roster” bonuses) are taken, like base salary is, as a lump sum against the cap. So if a team is looking to create space, it simply takes money from roster bonuses and base salary and converts it into signing bonuses.
For what it’s worth, generally, this is a good sign of commitment from ownership to spend, since it allows the team to shell out cash over the salary cap (hence the “cash over cap” term). And in this case, re-doing Mahomes and Jones did, in fact, lead to immediate spending on the part of the Chiefs.
To do it, the Chiefs took Mahomes’s $32.35 million roster bonus for this year and converted it into a signing bonus (moving nearly $26 million of it into the next four years), and did the same with $15.395 million of his base (clearing more than $12 million). That generated a total of $38.196 million in room. Then, they converted a $15 million roster bonus due to Jones into a signing bonus, which opened up another $11.25 million in space.
The math if your eyes haven’t glazed over yet … Mahomes has more than five years left on his deal, so the new signing bonus money gets divided by five, with 20% dropped into each of the next five years, including this year. Jones has four years left (with two void years included), so his is divided by four, with 25% dropped in each year.
So they went from being $14.7 million over the cap Monday to $34.7 million under after those restructures. That allowed the Chiefs to sign Nick Bolton to a three-year, $45 million deal, ex-49er Jaylon Moore to a two-year, $30 million deal, Kristian Fulton to a two-year, $20 million deal (after making a real run at bringing Charvarius Ward back to Kansas City) and Marquise “Hollywood” Brown to a one-year, $6.85 million deal.
That leaves them with about $14 million or so in space, which will allow them flexibility to be aggressive in-season like they were last year in trading for DeAndre Hopkins and signing D.J. Humphries, or just roll the money over to next year.
Of course, they’ll eventually have to account for the $38.196 million they cleared because that money’s still getting to Mahomes and Jones. Maybe they’ll keep pushing the money forward. Maybe they’ll just take their medicine in one fell swoop—the way the Los Angeles Rams did two years ago, the Buffalo Bills last year, or the San Francisco 49ers are now—at some point.
Either way, this is all simply accounting for, not adjusting, what you spend.
New Orleans Saints
It’d be awfully tough for the New Orleans Saints to trade Derek Carr now. There were rumblings post-combine that, after early negotiations on adjusting his contract went nowhere, the veteran quarterback wanted to explore his options elsewhere. Then, New Orleans exercised its unilateral right to restructure his contract, and seemingly put an end to the idea that he’ll play for anyone but the Saints.
Last week, I told you I wanted to wait for the details of the restructure. Now that I have them … it wouldn’t be impossible for the Saints to deal Carr … but don’t hold your breath.
The math is similar to what we just went over with the Chiefs. The Saints maxed out the conversion on Carr—so $28.745 million of his $30 million base, which was taken down to the league minimum, became a signing bonus. They also triggered a proration of a $10 million roster bonus that was due Saturday, which will take $8 million off this year’s cap and spread it out from 2026 to ’29. That means a total of $30.996 million gets added to the existing cap charges of $28.674 million already pushed into those years.
Which means if the Saints were to move him now, they’ll have given Carr $38.745 million in cash for 2025 to play somewhere else and they’ll have to take the $59.67 million in acceleration on to their cap. Which they could do, I guess, but wouldn’t make much sense.
So it’s hard to see where Carr isn’t in New Orleans in 2025, though given the desperation of a couple teams right now, I actually think there’d be a decent market for him if he became available.
That also means they’ll have to get on the same page with Carr again.
The good news is I don’t imagine Kellen Moore will have much trouble doing that.
Philadelphia Eagles
The Philadelphia Eagles are still playing chess. Shout out to my editor John Pluym for passing this along—the Super Bowl champions, as it stands right now, have 16 draft picks over the next two years, 15 of which are in the first five rounds, and that number should grow in 2026.
In this year’s draft, they have their own picks in the first five rounds, plus fifth-rounders from the Browns (Kenny Pickett), Houston Texans (2024 draft-day trade down) and Washington Commanders (a giveback in the Jahan Dotson trade). Next year, they have their own picks in the first five rounds, their own seventh-rounder, plus the Jets’ third-rounder (Haason Reddick) and the Texans’ fifth-rounder (C.J. Gardner-Johnson). On top of that, next year, they’ll likely score comp picks for Milton Williams, Josh Sweat, Mekhi Becton and Isaiah Rodgers with projections giving them compensatory picks in third, fourth, fifth and sixth rounds. They now are expected to have five of the top 100 picks, and 12 overall selections in the ’26 draft.
That leaves GM Howie Roseman with a treasure trove of picks to maneuver in the draft and fortify the depth of his roster with, and it happens, in large part, because of his job security.
Not every GM can keep trading into the future like Roseman. Not every GM can horse-trade quarterbacks that, if all goes well, won’t play. Not many GMs can take a five-year view to everything they do. And if you have those earned edges and if you can keep coming out of offseasons with a net-positive in picks, eventually, it grows into the war chest of picks for Philly.
In other words, the rich are getting richer off their own wealth.
Cash is king
I’m gonna build off something Mike Florio wrote over the weekend, and reiterate my point on the Josh Allen deal from last week’s Takeaways—and tell you that cash is still king. Florio, at Pro Football Talk, took down the notion that new-money calculations are the end-all, be-all when it comes to players’ winnings in free-agent negotiations. For those who care about such minutiae, I agree. Here’s why …
• Most of these deals won’t run beyond two or three years. And there are a lot of examples out there of misleading totals not really telling the story of deals. Davante Adams’s 2022 contract in Las Vegas is a good example. On paper, it was a five-year, $140.25 million deal, putting him at a little more than $28 million per year. But there was $36.25 million in each of the final two years, money he’d never see that boosted the APY.
• As such, three things matter on these deals. How much cash the player will actually collect, how much of that is guaranteed and how fast it will get to him. In other words, if the first two years are guaranteed, but not the third year, having a big number in the third year, rather than the fifth year, is a big deal.
Generally, the bigger quarterback deals won’t have the inflated back-end numbers, and do have longer guarantees, so the actual APY (average per year) vs. the new-money APY is important. Here, then, are the top 10 …
- Josh Allen, Bills, $55 million APY
- Dak Prescott, Cowboys, $54.8 million APY
- Lamar Jackson, Ravens, $52 million APY
- Jared Goff, Lions, $48.1 million APY
- Tua Tagovailoa, Dolphins, $47.1 million APY
- Patrick Mahomes, Chiefs, $46.3 million APY
- Jordan Love, Packers, $46.2 million APY
- Deshaun Watson, Browns, $46 million APY
- Kirk Cousins, Falcons, $45 million APY
- Joe Burrow, Bengals, $44.3 million APY
That calculation, of course, isn’t perfect, either. Burrow’s deal folded in two existing years of a rookie deal that he got the first year he was eligible, while Tagovailoa and Love both got their new deals after four years with just an option year to fold in, and Jackson made it all the way to his walk year and was franchised. Cousins’s deal came on the open market.
And all those different factors make it hard to apple-to-apple any of this stuff.
But as far as actual cash goes, that’s the list.
Indianapolis Colts
Daniel Jones’s decision was based on opportunity. Two years after signing a four-year, $160 million deal to stay a Giant, the former first-round pick hit the market last week trying to pump life back into a career on the ropes.
Since signing that contract, Jones started 16 games, winning just three of them while throwing for 2,979 yards, 10 touchdowns, 13 picks and a 76.6 passer rating.
He was cut, cleared waivers, was signed for the rest of the season by the Vikings, and got to free agency with great value only if you saw the Giants, rather than Jones himself, as the problem over the past two years—and the potential he showed in 2022 still there.
Luckily for Jones, some teams, including the team that just had him, saw it that way. Ultimately, he wound up signing a one-year deal with the Indianapolis Colts, with $13.15 million fully guaranteed, $14 million in base pay, and $3.7 million in incentives. The Vikings, for their part, were right in that neighborhood on a one-year deal.
And Jones, I’m told, picked what he saw as the better chance to win, and keep, a starting job. If he went back to Minnesota and J.J. McCarthy turned the corner in the coming weeks, and maintained the momentum into the spring, given that the Vikings just took him 10th in the 2024 draft, it’d have been hard for Jones to dislodge him from the lineup. Anthony Richardson, conversely, is at the end, rather than the start, of his window to make the team that drafted him his own.
I’d agree with the logic, too. If Jones has a great spring and summer, and Richardson is just O.K., I don’t think there’ll be any fear on Shane Steichen’s part to go full steam ahead with the ex-Giant and Viking—and give him the leeway McCarthy would probably get in Minnesota.
San Francisco 49ers
San Francisco 49ers fans shouldn’t panic. What happened over the past few weeks wasn’t a positive development. I’d agree with that. A lot of good players—Deebo Samuel, Aaron Banks, Jaylon Moore, Javon Hargrave, Maliek Collins, Leonard Floyd, Dre Greenlaw, Charvarius Ward and Talanoa Hufanga, to name a few—are gone, and the 49ers are not better for it.
But this day was coming, one way or another.
Going into the offseason, without a full roster, or a single free-agent addition or draft pick, the Niners were at around $300 million in cap commitments. And after an injury-riddled 6–11 season, they had a choice. They could kick the can down the road again and make another hard run at a championship. Or they could rip the Band-Aid off and reset, with a quarterback’s contract in the offing and an aging roster around him.
Clearly, they chose Door No. 2. After a run of four NFC title games in five years, with two Super Bowl trips mixed in, I get that it’s not the easiest pill to swallow. But it doesn’t have to mean that the Niners go into the crapper for a year or two.
The two most recent examples are the 2023 Los Angeles Rams and ’24 Buffalo Bills. Both carried around $75 million in dead cap charges—money on the cap accounting for players no longer on the team—into those seasons. The Rams went 10–7 the year they took their cap medicine and lost by a point on the road to the Detroit Lions in the playoffs. Likewise, Buffalo went 13–4, then made it to the AFC title game.
The thing that those teams had in common was high-level quarterback play and a run of strong drafts that gave the clubs cost-controlled talent to allow for the black hole of cap space expended on roster ghosts. That, then, puts the pressure on Brock Purdy to elevate the players around him, and coach Kyle Shanahan and GM John Lynch to continue drafting and developing the way they have over the past eight years.
I’d be optimistic, if not certain, those three will answer the bell.
Los Angeles Chargers
The Los Angeles Chargers’ continued investment in the offensive line should give everyone confidence in where Jim Harbaugh’s bringing the program. The Chargers drafted right tackle Joe Alt last year with the fifth pick and are negotiating a long-term deal with left tackle Rashawn Slater. They brought back Bradley Bozeman on a reasonable two-year, $6.5 million deal that’s heavy on play-time incentives. And they added Mekhi Becton at guard. Add former first-round guard Zion Johnson to that mix, and you have four former top-20 picks starting along with the heady vet Bozeman, who’s spent five of his seven NFL seasons with Chargers offensive coordinator Greg Roman.
You want an identity for a team? It’s right there, and it reflects the way Harbaugh’s 49ers teams (that had three former first-round picks on the line) and Michigan and Stanford teams (that were loaded with future NFL guys) were built. And now that they’ve got that taken care of, the Chargers can dive into who Justin Herbert is going to throw the ball to.
Quick-hitters
The quick-hitters are coming hot this week …
• The Cincinnati Bengals pushed four-year extensions for Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins over the goal line Sunday. Got two thoughts on it. One, so much of this was so simple. Chase’s deal is a touch over what Myles Garrett got on a new money average ($40.25 million vs. $40 million), and Higgins’s APY essentially uses the 120% calculation in the franchise tag rules (though tagging Higgins a third time would’ve cost way more than that next year) and two-tag principle to establish the average of $28.75 million. My second thought: Taking new-money math out, those two plus Joe Burrow now have contracts averaging about $110 million. That’s a big number, of course. But with the cap likely to top $300 million next year, it won’t be impossible to work around (yes, it’d have been preferable to get all this done last year, but it takes two to tango on that, and the Bengals did offer Chase a deal at $36 million per year in September). And also … happy quarterback … happy life.
• Joe Flacco visited the Giants last week—which was a way, I think, for the team to check him out, and for Flacco to get his name back in circulation. Yes, he’s 40. But as a one-year solution, at a way cheaper rate than Cousins or Rodgers, I think the guy can still play. And the Browns, Steelers and Vikings think enough of him still to have checked on him.
• For the past couple weeks, teams had kept an eye on Jordan Mason’s availability, given the likelihood the Niners would put a second-round tender on him, and the fact that the lump-sum of that tender, at $5.346 million, was probably a bit much for a San Francisco team trying to clean out its cap. So that’s a good get for Minnesota, which could transition from Aaron Jones to Mason as its lead back in 2026.
• I had this stat passed along over the weekend—we’re now down to six free-agent quarterbacks who played more than 25% of their teams’ snaps in 2025. Those six, in order, are Rodgers (96.1%), Russell Wilson (63.7%), Flacco (43.0%), Jameis Winston (42.7%), Drew Lock (28.5%) and Tyler Huntley (27.6%). The pickings are slim for teams that need a starter, especially when you add this to the quality (or lack thereof) of the draft class at quarterback.
• I like the Cooper Kupp signing in Seattle. While he’s been predominantly a slot receiver over the course of his career, he’s played outside plenty (272 snaps last year, per PFF), and Klint Kubiak’s offense is going to value versatility in its receivers. Jaxon Smith-Njigba, who was dominant out of the slot last year, has similar malleability. And I tend to think when you have guys with the football IQ those two do, you’ll be able to figure out roles.
• Kupp’s signing didn’t exactly set off a flurry of receiver signings. A couple (JuJu Smith-Schuster, DeAndre Hopkins) have come off the market, but a bunch—Amari Cooper, Brandin Cooks, Keenan Allen, Stefon Diggs and Tyler Lockett among them—remain available. It’ll be interesting to see if any of those guys start taking visits this week, rather than just signing somewhere.
• The New England Patriots’ splurge was great, because to me, it’s just like what the Commanders did last year, leveraging connections to their coaching staff to investigate and land Robert Spillane, Carlton Davis III, Morgan Moses, Marcus Epps and Harold Landry III. That said, I think it’s hard to grade how New England did without knowing the rest of the plan for protecting Drake Maye. They planned to take a swing on Ronnie Stanley before he re-signed in Baltimore, and did swing hard on Dan Moore Jr., Will Fries and Drew Dalman. Moses is a really nice addition, but the Patriots have work to do. And might have to take LSU’s Will Campbell at No. 4.
• Joey Bosa is a bit of a boom-or-bust signing for the Bills based on the injury risk—though it was pointed out to me that most of his recent ailments were more freak things that won’t recur than anything chronic. Buffalo’s bet is that they can get a little more from him than they did Von Miller, who’s six years older than Bosa.
• If you want to feel good about the Jets’ signing of Justin Fields, then know this—the Steelers did prioritize keeping Fields over trying to hold on to Wilson. He was well-liked in the building, and they felt like a lot of other people in that Fields just needs some runway to play. In the thick of the Rodgers chase, the Steelers couldn’t give him that, and I don’t think that they ever would’ve given him as much of it as the Jets just did with the contract Fields signed. It’ll be fun to see if Fields can take advantage of it.
• Evan Engram was a nice signing by the Denver Broncos, but I don’t know that’s he’s the “joker” that Sean Payton was talking about. The good news is the draft has a bunch of guys like that. I do wonder, though, if this makes it more likely that it’d be a back (such as Ohio State’s TreVeyon Henderson) or receiver Missouri’s Luther Burden III) than another tight end.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Execs Mixed on Aaron Rodgers: ‘He’s on the Downside’ and ‘the Guy Is Still a Beast’.
