Along the way, Jennings rejected (per McGinn) a reduced offer of $8 million per year from the Packers, and a $6 million annual flier from the Patriots.
Few saw the crash of the free-agency market coming, and plenty of agents already are whispering about collusion. It’s not suspected in the sense of broad spending restrictions, but with respect to quiet coordination among teams in an effort to set the market at certain positions.
This is something about players and agents that has been irritating me more and more lately. I have been predicting for a while now that this free-agency period was going to suck for a number of reasons, the two major being a) teams have been falling all over themselves unilaterally the past couple of years to give a few players gigantic contracts without even being pressured by other teams; b) the players were idiots for shooting themselves in the foot by voting themselves major increases in the veteran minimums, rendering a lot of the borderline players unemployable. There are plenty of players who might have been working for $600,000 a year, but now they can't find jobs because the vet minimum is $900,000 for players with that much experience.
So if someone like me, a rank amateur, can predict that the free agency period was going to get less lucrative, how could these guys, who are paid mega-bucks to do this on a daily basis, not have seen what was coming? In a lot of these ways, these agents seem stuck in the past and slow to adapt.
As I have said before, for all their talk about the business of football, players and agents are not very savvy businessmen.