NFL quarterback carousel preview: NYJ, LV loom
Ahead of NFL free agency, Mike Florio highlights which teams could target veteran quarterbacks, including the Jets, Steelers, Browns, Colts, Raiders, and more.
Video Transcript
Now that the coaching carousel has stopped spinning, the quarterback carousel is next, and I've been meaning to talk about this.
I've been meaning to write about it.
It came up this morning because I decided to write something about Malik Willis, because I think he's one of the more fascinating prospects as free agency approaches.
His numbers in limited play over the past two years with the Green Bay Packers are eye-popping.
Passer rating of over one thirty-four in eleven appearances with, I believe, three starts.
Six touchdown passes, no interceptions, over ten yards per attempt.
He has been incredible, but he hasn't played very much, and he's an unrestricted free agent.
So I broadened the lens, and I looked at the teams that may be looking for starters in free agency, the free agents who will be available, at least the ones worth mentioning, apologies to the ones who won't be mentioned, and the guys who may be cut or could be traded.
So as I see it, these teams could be, won't definitely be, but could be in the market for a veteran starting quarterback in free agency, which begins in less than three weeks.
The Jets, the Steelers, the Browns, the Colts, the Raiders, the Vikings, the Falcons, and the Cardinals.
That's eight teams.
It's twenty-five percent of the league.
I'm not saying all of them.
You know, the Browns, we don't know what they're gonna do.
They have Deshaun Watson, they have Shedeur Sanders, they have Dillon Gabriel.
We don't know what they're gonna do.
They may go off the board and bring in someone new.
They got a new head coach.
We don't know what they're gonna do.
The Jets have Justin Fields under contract.
They're probably looking for somebody, and I won't be surprised if Fields is gone.
I'll talk about him in a second.
The Steelers, I'm told, want Aaron Rodgers back.
If they're willing to wait for Aaron Rodgers, that takes them out of play in the early stages of free agency for any of the veterans that are gonna be out there.
The Colts presumably want Daniel Jones to come back.
He's recovering from the torn Achilles tendon.
All indications are he'll be back, but we'll see.
The Vikings need someone who will compete with and maybe supplant J.J. McCarthy.
I mentioned the Raiders.
They've got Geno Smith under contract.
They also hold the first overall pick in the draft.
They may end up with Fernando Mendoza and Smith.
I'll talk about him in a second as well.
The Falcons have Michael Penix Jr., but he's recovering from a torn ACL.
Will they want a veteran bridge to the moment when Penix is ready to go?
The Cardinals, they have Kyler Murray.
They also have Jacoby Brissett under contract, I believe, but they could be looking for someone new, given that they have a new head coach, and given that GM Monti Ossenfort, for the first time, has a chance to go out and try to find a starting quarterback.
I think that, that reality, that Ossenfort and former head coach Jonathan Gannon inherited Kyler Murray's contract, that saved Ossenfort.
It didn't save Gannon.
So the free agent options, the significant ones, I mentioned Malik Willis, Aaron Rodgers, Daniel Jones, Russell Wilson, Marcus Mariota, Joe Flacco, Tyrod Taylor, Kenny Pickett, Zach Wilson, and Jimmy Garoppolo.
There are others.
Carson Wentz.
There are others.
You can find them.
It's easy to Google it.
You'll find them.
Not an overabundance of veteran options, and some of those guys already expected to go back to where they played, like Rodgers and Jones.
Now, the other category is the guys who could be cut or if their teams can pull it off, a trade.
Cousins-- And I keep seeing reports that Cousins will be released.
When they redid his contract in January, it was clear he will be released.
The way that his new contract reads, it creates a two-day window, March eleven and March twelve, for the Falcons to cut him.
If they don't, every penny for the remainder of his salary becomes fully guaranteed through the remainder of his contract, this year and next year.
What Kirk Cousins did was reduce his salary so that when they cut him with a post-June one designation, they'll have a lower cap charge to carry until June one, and in exchange, they ensured he's gonna be released by guaranteeing the rest of the contract if he's on the roster as of March thirteen.
He will be cut.
He will be available.
I think he's a very intriguing option, even though he got a little salty with me at the scouting-- not the scouting combine, but at the Super Bowl.
I, I, I think he was awesome last year when he played.
A year removed from the torn Achilles tendon, he looked as good as he did before he suffered the injury, and one of the reasons the Achilles tendon dragged him down in twenty twenty-four, he's not a guy who musters the velocity and the power with his arm.
He uses more of his body.
When the base is screwed up by virtue of the torn Achilles tendon, it's harder to muster the power that you need, and you start putting stress elsewhere on the body, and it just beats the hell out of you, and we saw the performance dip.
We saw the, the arm strength not where it needed to be.
Now that he's healthy, he can still sling it, and they had some big wins down the stretch.
They beat the Bucs.
They beat the Rams in prime time.
He's gonna get paid.
Won't be a long-term deal, but he's gonna get paid.
I mean, why wouldn't the Jets want him for one or two years?
I don't know why the Steelers aren't thinking, "Maybe Cousins gives us a little better chance to win than a forty-two-year-old Aaron Rodgers would."
Tua Tagovailoa, likely gonna be cut.
We've been talking about him.
A trade will be very hard to pull off.
Kyler Murray, I think, will be cut.
Justin Fields, I mentioned him earlier, I think he'll be cut.
And Geno Smith, this one's kind of strange because about two-thirds of his salary for twenty twenty-six is already guaranteed.
The rest of it becomes fully guaranteed on the third day of the league year.
I could see them keep him as the bridge to Fernando Mendoza.
I don't think that's impossible.
They could trade him- They could, in theory, cut him, but they owe him sixteen eight, I believe, is the number already for twenty twenty-six.
It's another eight million, or thereabouts, that becomes fully guaranteed on the third day of the league year.
I don't know what they're gonna do, and we've been so focused on Mendoza to the Raiders, I think people have lost sight of the fact that they still have Geno Smith under contract, and it's not, like, a ridiculously crazy number.
And, yeah, he could be the guy who just gets things rolling while they get Mendoza ready.
And remember, when, when Clint Kubiak became the offensive coordinator of the Seahawks last year, at his introductory press conference, he said that Geno Smith was a big draw to the job, and then Smith got traded.
Well, now Kubiak's head coach of the Raiders, so I could see it work.
Smith for now, Mendoza when he's ready, and then Smith elsewhere.
He may not be happy about it, but what can he really do at this point?
Now, as to Darnold, because when it comes to pegging the value of these free agent quarterbacks, or the guys who are gonna be cut and become free agents, like, what, what really is the magic number?
The market for veteran quarterbacks is very broad.
We saw it as low as ten point five million for Russell Wilson last year on a one-year deal.
He got benched after three games.
The top of the market is basically sixty.
If we don't do a new money analysis on Josh Allen's contract that he signed last year, and the two sides kind of wink, nod, we're not gonna do the new money analysis 'cause it would've been, like, eighty million dollars a year, 'cause what they did is they took the remaining years of the contract, they ripped them up, and they replaced it with a fresh six-year contract.
But if you only look-- 'cause the new money analysis would be, you take the three extra years on the back end, and you look at the extra money he's getting compared to what he was gonna get, and you divide it by three, and that's the new money.
It works out to, like, eighty million a year.
They didn't do that.
So we'll stipulate that the top of the market's sixty.
Ten to sixty, where are these guys gonna fall?
And look at Sam Darnold last year.
The guy who won the Super Bowl got thirty-three and a half million a year on a three-year deal.
In hindsight, he should have insisted on a one-year contract.
Now, maybe he tried, but he didn't have the leverage, 'cause he had one team that wanted him.
We talked about that last week.
Everybody wants to drag the Vikings for not keeping him.
Steelers could've had him, Raiders could've had him, other teams could've had him.
Nobody wanted him except the Seahawks, so they offer him a hundred point five million on a three-year deal with a significant amount of it guaranteed.
Maybe he would've preferred a one-year deal, but they weren't willing to do it.
The, the best outcome for a guy like Malik Willis, if you're not gonna get forty million a year, is a one-year deal with a no-tag clause.
But if you have the leverage to get a one-year deal with a no-tag clause, you probably got the leverage to get a forty million dollar contract on a multi-year deal.
I don't know that Willis is willing to bet on himself.
I think he'd probably like to go somewhere where he knows he's going to be for multiple years and develop some consistency and continuity.
But those are the parameters, ten point five and sixty, and you got I don't know how robust of a class is gonna become free agency.
You got the possibility of guys like Aaron Rodgers doing a sweetheart deal like he did last year.
He got thirteen point six five from the Steelers, and he unlocked another half million in incentives that were based on how far the Steelers got.
They made it to the playoffs, he got another five hundred thousand, so it ended up being fourteen point one five million for one year.
Is he gonna do a deal like that again with the Steelers or whoever he would sign with?
That's a factor.
And then Daniel Jones last year only got fourteen million.
So we don't know what this market's gonna bear, but what's the most important position?
It's quarterback.
And this is why I'm so fascinated by Malik Willis.
What we've seen from him during his two years in Green Bay, when he's had a chance to play, suggests he could become a superstar.
We just don't know, and we won't know until he's grinding it out week in and week out.
He got injured late in the year last year.
Could there be durability issues?
But, but you typically only find a franchise quarterback in the draft, typically in the top of the draft.
The Tom Bradys are extremely few and far between.
That what makes-- That's what makes it such a compelling story.
Usually, it's a first-round guy, and in the first round, it's a flip of a coin as to whether or not he pans out.
Here's a guy who has played, and in the time that he's played the past two years, we got to set aside Tennessee, I just think that was a bad fit for both sides, but based on what he did in Green Bay, how do you not get excited about what he could do?
And if multiple teams get sufficiently excited, that could drive the number up.
So the quarterback s- carousel is going to begin to spin, and we'll see where it goes, and we'll see who ends up where when the dust begins to settle.
But that's coming.
Combine next week, and then there's one week before the two-day negotiating window begins.
We've still got the franchise tags to be applied.
Daniel Jones is the only one who potentially would get tagged, and I don't think he will, but we'll see.
But quarterbacks, critical to any NFL team, and there's gonna be some quarterbacks on the move.
