play1:06Cam Ward is building chemistry with Wan’Dale RobinsonTurron Davenport reports on Wan’Dale Robinson’s introductory news conference with the Titans.
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Cam Ward is building chemistry with Wan’Dale RobinsonTurron Davenport reports on Wan’Dale Robinson’s introductory news conference with the Titans.
Do younger free agents work out more often than older ones?
Sorting 30 free agents with the biggest contracts from 2013 to 2022
Few things are more exciting for NFL teams than landing a star free agent. It’s cause for celebration among executives, coaches and fans alike. That first social media post hinting at the news? The official announcement? The photo op? The excited tweets from new teammates? It’s literally in the name. Who doesn’t want to get something for free?
It’s fun, sure. But are these splashy moves always a good idea? How often do premium free agents really work out? In recent years, key signings have turned the tide for Super Bowl winners. Saquon Barkley and Zack Baun were superstars for the 2024 Eagles. Sam Darnold put together dominant stretches for the 2025 Seahawks. In the big picture, though, how often does a team sign a significant free agent, look back and say that it spent wisely?
There are other interesting questions we can answer, too. Do certain types of players work out better than others? Are certain positions more likely to deliver free agent successes? Do younger players work out better than older ones? And at the very top of the market over that 10-season span, how did the highest-paid deals actually pan out? I’ll try to answer all of those today.
Things I considered here: How long were these players starting? If they had been a starter previously, did they live up to that level of play after accounting for aging curves (which are priced into the contracts)? If they were graduating from a rotational role into the starting lineup, did they then play at a starter level? And if they were being paid like a superstar at the top of their position’s market, were they difference-makers?
5: High-end starter who consistently exceeds his contract value. This might be more realistic. When you consider that there are plenty of talented wideouts on rookie deals, Robinson’s AAV makes it so that he equates to a very high-end WR2, if not a low-end WR1. An efficient WR2 in an offense that throws at a league-average rate is going to rack up somewhere around 850-900 receiving yards in a solid season.
To earn a “5” grade, Robinson would have to consistently top 1,000 yards — and approaching 1,200 — per season. He would need to make a Pro Bowl or be in the discussion. He would need to stay healthy, given that injuries are the easiest way for free agents to disappoint. Robinson would need to play well enough that the Titans feel as if they got a bargain at $17.5 million annually and landed someone who could legitimately function as the WR1 in a good offense.
3: Player who lives up to expectations. This is the average performance grade. The Titans are paying Robinson to be a very good WR2 over the next two years. If he delivers 850-900 receiving yards per season and stays healthy through those first two guaranteed seasons, Tennessee general manager Mike Borgonzi would have essentially gotten what he wanted. This sort of player typically stays on the roster for at least one year after their guaranteed money runs out.
Cam Ward is building chemistry with Wan’Dale Robinson
Turron Davenport reports on Wan’Dale Robinson’s introductory news conference with the Titans.
There’s nothing wrong with committing this sort of money to Robinson in the hopes of a more certain option than going to the draft, but there are a lot of ways it can go wrong. When a draft pick doesn’t live up to expectations or gets hurt, the team’s out only $2.5 million or so per year for a second-round pick or $1.2 million per year for a fourth-rounder. If Robinson is only a marginal receiver or misses meaningful time to injury, that’s $17 million that could have gone elsewhere.
Free agents who score a “2” don’t live up to what their new team expected. In this case, Robinson would fall out of the starting lineup, fail to consistently produce at the level of an above-average WR2 or suffer injuries that keep him from suiting up regularly. The Titans are paying Robinson for both certainty and upside. If they get neither, that won’t be a great free agent signing.
1: Player who seriously underwhelms. Some free agents just turn out to be colossal mistakes. At wide receiver last year, Dyami Brown and Tutu Atwell both signed one-year deals for $10 million. Brown was a healthy scratch in the second half of the season for the Jaguars, while Atwell managed only six catches in 10 games. Neither player landed anywhere near as much money when they hit the market again this offseason.
At this tier, we’re seeing players who miss most of their time under contract to injuries, players who were expected to start but got benched early in their tenures and guys who were cut with meaningful guaranteed money remaining on their deals. Robinson would need to be out of the lineup by the end of Year 1 or miss most of 2026 and 2027 with injuries to fall here.
OK — those are our potential grades for each deal. Now, let’s run through what I found after looking at those 500 free agents and how the moves panned out.
If we split each year’s top 50 into groups by average annual salary, the top free agents are actually worse, not better, than the players below them. In part, that’s because expectations are higher. It’s also because many of those contracts go to quarterbacks, and as I’ll get to in a moment, free agency tends to be a very high-variance place to go for a starting quarterback.
While the sample gets small at certain positions — particularly at running back — there is a pretty consistent trend. Players who touch the ball fail most often, while players who have a more subtle impact on the game are more likely to deliver or exceed expectations.
Quarterbacks weren’t far off. By the nature of the position and some of the ill-fated decisions teams have made, their results tended to be more extreme. Because even backup quarterbacks make enough to land in the top 50 some years, the success rate here is boosted by players who were solid in a handful starts, including Teddy Bridgewater’s run with the Saints and Nick Foles’ two-year stint filling in for Carson Wentz with the Eagles.
Let’s put that into perspective. We can compare players and their contracts across seasons by adjusting their salaries for cap inflation. Kirk Cousins’ three-year, $84 million contract isn’t the largest in raw value, but with Cousins making $28 million per year on a deal he signed in 2018, that figure represents 15.8% of the $177.2 million cap the league operated under that year. Cousins’ deal is the largest cap-adjusted salary for any of the 500 signings in the dataset.
If we sort each position by those adjusted salaries, we can see whether the top of the market plays better at certain positions than others. Leaving running back aside because of the small sample, there’s another interesting trend here. Let’s compare the 15 highest-paid players at each position to the rest of the player pool at that position by their success rates.
Answering this question is complicated. The league already builds in what it believes to be aging curves at each position, which is why we see veterans such as Jamel Dean and Mike Evans sign smaller contracts in free agency than their recent play would suggest. Teams are paying for what they think players are going to do as opposed to what they’ve done, which is fair enough. But I’ve tried to keep that in mind as I evaluate those contracts.
With that being said, younger free agents are still more productive and succeed more often than their older counterparts. I’ve rounded ages down to the closest full year to make evaluation simpler, but free agents who are at or entering their peak years (hitting free agency at ages 24-27) are better bets than players in their peak seasons (ages 28-30) or post-peak years (ages 31-plus), even after accounting for contract size.
Let’s finish up by taking a look at the absolute cream of the crop. After adjusting everyone’s average annual salary for the cap the year they signed, we can review the 30 biggest contracts in free agency over that 10-year span of 2013-22. While I’ve mostly dealt with big-picture looks at the player pool in this piece, here’s a chance to see how those findings impacted some of the most prominent signings of that decade. I’ll go from most expensive to least expensive, again adjusting for cap.
While some of these deals with high average annual values don’t have spectacular guarantees under the hood, Cousins’ first contract with the Vikings was famously fully guaranteed. Having run through two franchise tags with Washington, Cousins was able to hit unrestricted free agency in the prime of his career. Entering his age-30 season, the Vikings fought off the Jets to sign Cousins to the largest deal of the specific decade we’re evaluating.
Suh’s free agency was a product of the old, predraft slotting collective bargaining agreement. Top-five picks in that era could land contracts at the top of the veteran market before ever stepping on the field, and in perennially drafting toward the top of the board, the Lions hit on Suh, receiver Calvin Johnson and quarterback Matthew Stafford in a four-year span. After years of cap gymnastics, the Lions ran out of runway and decided to keep Johnson and Stafford over Suh.
During that same 2020 offseason, Rivers also left the only franchise he had ever played for to jump to a new team. The Colts signed Rivers to a one-year deal as the latest in their series of Andrew Luck replacements, and Rivers lived up to his end of the bargain. He threw for 4,169 yards and 24 touchdowns, leading the Colts to a wild-card berth in the process. Rivers retired after the season before returning on a much smaller deal with the Colts last December.