The 15 worst NFL free agency moves of the 2020s

To set some parameters: 

This includes trades, but only if they’re in the month of March. The Jets traded for Aaron Rodgers before the 2022 season. That was an unbelievable failure … but that trade happened at the end of April, so it’s not going to count. 
 
I’m going to try to keep immediate post-signing injuries out of it. Let’s say that Aaron Rodgers’ trade did happen at the beginning of free agency. He popped that Achilles immediately, so it wouldn’t count. On the other hand, let’s say a hypothetical team signed an alleged sexual predator to their team. If this hypothetical quarterback blows his shoulder a year later and then blows his Achilles the year after that, he would count… hypothetically. 

Extensions don’t count. Plain and simple, this is about re-signings and new acquisitions. 

Let’s get into it.

The Eagles knew that they were going to trade Hasson Reddick at some point in the 2024 offseason, so they signed Bryce Huff to a three-year contract for $51.1 million. He did not vibe with Vic Fangio’s scheme even a little bit. In the regular season, he only played 272 defensive snaps, had 18 pressures, four QB hits, and 2.5 sacks. 

The thing that sums up this blunder the most is that Huff was a healthy scratch in the Super Bowl… A Super Bowl that the Eagles won with a dominant four-man edge rusher rotation.

It’s not a great idea to sign a player coming off a career year. It’s an even worse idea to do that when that player is a running back who had a career-high in carries. It’s an even, even worse idea when that running back is coming from a team with one of the most dominant offensive lines in the NFL, and the new team doesn’t have a competitive offensive line. 

The Panthers did that in 2023 when they signed Miles Sanders to a four-year $25.4 million contract. He went from 259 carries for 1,269 yards and 11 touchdowns in Philadelphia to 129 carries for 432 yards and one touchdown in Carolina.

On top of that, Chuba Hubbard had a breakout season that year and ended up getting paid in 2024. It was a really bad process, and even worse results for the Panthers.

The Titans reset the wide receiver market when they signed 29-year-old Calvin Ridley to a four-year deal for $92 million. That’s a whole lot of money to pay a wide receiver who is getting the ball thrown to him by Will Levis. 

2024 was a pretty solid season for him. He had 64 catches for 1,017 yards but only four touchdowns. That’s not $23 million worth of production. 

He only played in seven games in 2025 before he broke his leg. That means he’s going to be 31 years old and coming off a wicked injury in 2026 … That’s not a great combination.

In 2021, the Patriots did this really weird thing where they signed both Hunter Henry and Jonnu Smith to two pretty big contracts. Henry got a three-year deal for $37.5 million, and Smith got a four-year deal for a whopping $50 million. 

Smith was the best free agent tight end on the market that year, and he got paid like it. He was coming off a 2020 season with 41 catches for 448 yards and eight touchdowns. 

That didn’t carry over to New England. In his two years with the Patriots, he had 55 catches for 539 yards and two touchdowns. In 2022, they traded him to the Falcons for a measly seventh-round pick. At the end of the day, the Patriots invested elite-player money into Smith, and in return, they got Isaiah Bolden … who is now on the 49ers practice squad.

Going into free agency in 2021, NFL.com ranked Corey Davis as the 32nd-best free agent available. The Titans drafted him fifth overall in 2017, so he clearly had something worth liking… it just never really came about, and they ended up not exercising his fifth-year option.

The Jets were about to draft their quarterback of the future, and they needed a veteran wide receiver to help that quarterback grow. That quarterback was Zach Wilson, so that didn’t happen.

Regardless, they signed Davis to a three-year deal for $37.5 million. In 2021, he only played in nine games before he had some kind of core muscle surgery. He finished the season with 34 catches for 492 yards, four touchdowns, and a career-high 8.5 percent drop rate (the league average that season was 4.4 percent).

When you pay that kind of money to a guy like that, you’re expecting a whole lot more … But it’s the Jets, so it kind of makes a whole lot of sense.

The Eagles had the right idea when they re-signed James Bradberry after the 2022 season. He was the second-team All-Pro cornerback and shut down an entire side of the field for 19 out of the 20 games they played that season.

The problem is that when cornerbacks fall off, they really fall off. He went from allowing a 45.3 percent completion rate, a passer rating of 54.7, 353 yards, three touchdowns, and three interceptions in 2022, to a 59.4 percent completion rate, a passer rating of 112.1, 716 yards, nine touchdowns, and one interception in 2023 (per NFL Pro). The fall off was unreal, and it was one of the many reasons the Eagles had the late-season collapse that yea

If you’re looking for an offensive tackle in free agency, getting a guy who spent four years in the Eagles’ offensive line room with Jeff Stoutland and Lane Johnson is a good place to start… unless that offensive tackle stinks.

That’s what the Titans got when they signed Andre Dillard to a three-year deal for $29 million in 2023. 

He played just 562 snaps (56 percent) in 2023. In those snaps, he allowed 41 pressures, 9 QB hits, 20 hurries, and a league-high 12 sacks. That’s not what they paid for.

2021 J.C. Jackson was amazing. He was a second-team All-Pro with eight interceptions, including an 88-yard pick-six and 23 passes defended. He was an absolute menace. The Chargers signed him in free agency to a five-year, $82.5 million contract. If that money didn’t get voided, he’d be the 10th-highest paid cornerback in the NFL (in 2022, he was the second-highest).

But it did get voided. He flat-out stunk that season, got benched, came back in a week or two later, and tore his patellar tendon. In just five games, he allowed 16 catches (a 66.7 percent completion rate) for 344 yards and four touchdowns.

They ended up trading him back to the Patriots for peanuts in 2023, and now he’s out of the league.

Do you remember how good Christian Wilkins was with the Dolphins? The dude hardly ever came off the field, was a brick wall against the run, and lived in the backfield on passing downs. NFL.com had him as the fourth-best free agent available in 2024.

The Raiders were the team to give him a four-year deal for $110 million. $87 million was guaranteed money, and every penny was deserved.

Five games into the 2024 season, he broke one of the bones in his foot, had surgery, and went on IR for the rest of the season.

Fast-forward to this past offseason: The story (that we know of) is that Wilkins smooched one of his teammates on the head, that teammate reported him to HR, and the Raiders cut him and voided $35.2 million of his guaranteed money. 

So … that happened quickly.

Kirk Cousins should’ve been in a tough spot after he tore his Achilles with the Vikings in 2023. He was 35 years old, catastrophically hurt, and going into free agency. 

That didn’t stop the Falcons from signing him to a four-year deal for $180 million … and then picking Michael Penix with the ninth overall pick in the draft a month later. 

Kirko hasn’t been an absolute dud when he’s played in Atlanta, so this failure isn’t as much about the player as it is about the franchise being wildly incompetent (unrelated, but they don’t have their own 2026 first-round pick).

Kenny Golladay had a perfectly good 2019 season. He had 116 catches for 1,190 yards and an NFL high 11 touchdowns. That earned him the honors of being a Pro-Bowler … after Chris Godwin opted out because of an injury.

In 2020, Golladay only played five games because of hamstring and hip injuries, so of course the Giants saw all of that and signed him to a four-year deal for $72 million. 

In 2021, he racked up an enormous 76 catches for 521 yards and zero touchdowns. In 2022, he kept that train rolling by having six catches for 81 yards … all season. 

This should go down as one of the worst free agent signings of all time. The process, the results, the entire idea … every single thing about it was terrible.

The Colts were just floating along in 2019 when they hit a rogue WWII-era anti-boat mine that came in the shape of Andrew Luck’s surprise retirement. Since then, they’ve been bailing water as they’ve been sinking. At first, they tried Jacoby Brissett and Phillip Rivers. Rivers took them to the postseason, but then retired (not by surprise).

In 2021, their quarterback solution was to trade a 2021 third-round pick and a 2022 conditional second-round pick for Carson Wentz. The conditions for that pick were very important: the pick would be a first-rounder if Wentz played 75 percent of the offensive snaps or if he played 70 percent of the snaps and the Colts made the playoffs. 

Even though Wentz was playing like a stinker, the Colts were on the playoff bubble, so they kept playing him instead of benching him to lower his snap percentage; the conditions were met, and the Eagles got the Colts’ 2022 first-round pick … and the Colts moved on from Wentz the next offseason. 

None of the quarterbacks in the 2022 draft were going to fix the Colts’ problem, but neither did Wentz … and losing a first-round pick on a guy who didn’t fix your problem is a very bad move.

For his first act as the head coach/general manager of the Houston Texans, Bill O’Brien traded prime DeAndre Hopkins to the Arizona Cardinals for running back David Johnson and some draft picks. 

At that point, Hopkins was a first-team All-Pro receiver for three straight years while David Johnson was coming off a season where he had 94 carries for 345 yards and two touchdowns.

This was one of the worst trades any team has made in the past 10 years. Truly, and hilariously, one-sided and abysmal. 

In 2020, Hopkins would go on to be a second-team All-Pro, Johnson would rush for 691 yards, and O’Brien would get fired after four games.

This trade does not get talked about nearly enough. If you think about it once a day, then think about it twice a day. If you think about it twice a day, get it tattooed on the inside of your eyelids so you see it when you sleep. 

Right now, the Broncos are in line to get the top seed in the AFC playoffs with a 13-3 record, which is incredibly impressive because four seasons ago, they traded two first-round picks, two second-round picks, a fifth-round pick, Drew Lock, Shelby Harris, and Noah Fant for Russell Wilson.

It was a catastrophe. He stunk up and down the field, and there were all kinds of reports about him with weird off-the-field stuff; he had his own office and his teammates hated that, he was jogging on the plane as they were going overseas, his house had a billion bathrooms… It was all kinds of weird stuff that fell exactly in line with what we know about Russell Wilson’s personality.

They bit the bullet, traded him away, and they’re doing really well now … but that doesn’t stop this from being one of the biggest universal failures ever.

You don’t have to say a whole lot about this one. Just don’t trade your future for a sexual predator, and certainly don’t pay that sexual predator a fully guaranteed five-year contract for $230 million.

The Browns knew exactly what they were doing and who they were signing.