Mar 26, 2026
NFLFirst & TenSeattleKansas CityMinneapolisPittsburghLas VegasEdmonton
Great organizations pay what their players are worth. Super Bowl MVPs go to the Chiefs. Second chances matter. Ten things I am watching this week.
Jaxon Smith-Njigba is 24 years old and he just became the highest-paid wide receiver in the history of professional football. Four years. $168.8 million. $42.15 million a year. The number surpasses Ja'Marr Chase's record by almost two million dollars per year. And Seattle made it happen without drama, without a holdout, without a single day of negotiating theater. They saw what they had. They paid for it. They moved on.
Continue reading →Mar 26, 2026
NFLKansas CitySeattle
127 yards and two touchdowns in the Super Bowl. Now he plays for Patrick Mahomes. The Chiefs upgraded their running back with the player who beat them eight weeks ago.
The Kansas City Chiefs signed running back Kenneth Walker to a three-year contract worth $43.05 million with $28.7 million fully guaranteed on Thursday, adding the Super Bowl LX Most Valuable Player to an offense that has now won three championships in the last six seasons. Walker, 25, earned MVP honors in Super Bowl LX with 127 rushing yards and two touchdowns in Seattle's 29-13 victory — the performance that defined his public profile entering free agency and set the market price that Kansas City ultimately met. He spent three seasons with the Seahawks as their primary ball carrier, averaging 4.6 yards per carry over his career and producing at least 900 rushing yards in each of his last two seasons.
Continue reading →Mar 15, 2026
NFLKansas CityNew YorkLas Vegas
Kansas City, the Jets, and Las Vegas figure to be the most active teams in week two. The draft on April 23 creates the practical end of the veteran market.
The first week of the NFL's new league year produced the major transactions most expected — quarterback acquisitions, premium receivers tagged or traded, defensive impact players changing addresses — and left a secondary wave of business for the next two to three weeks. Week two of free agency typically features more deliberate transactions: teams that missed week-one targets recalibrating, players whose contract asks were too high finding that the market has moved past them, and veterans released in cap-clearing moves finding landing spots.
Continue reading →Mar 10, 2026
NFLBostonLas VegasPhiladelphiaKansas City
The first wave is always the most volatile. What the early movement tells us about which teams were prepared and which are still catching up.
The NFL's free-agent negotiating window opened Monday evening, and the first twenty-four hours produced the volume of activity that the league's calendar always generates in this window — which is to say, a great deal of reported movement and a great deal of caution about treating any of it as settled. The window allows teams to negotiate with players whose contracts have expired but prohibits official signings until 4 PM ET Wednesday, when the new league year begins. The gap between agreement and announcement is what makes this forty-eight-hour period simultaneously the most active and least verifiable in the offseason calendar.
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