The sports calendar each March is a busy time filled with NCAA March Madness and the closing weeks of the NBA and NHL regular seasons before their long postseason begins. Baseball’s regular season this year starts next week in Japan.
However, all that sports activity is overshadowed in the media each March by the official start of the new NFL league year and the dozens of veteran free agent signings and player trades that annually occur.
The official start of the NFL year is tomorrow (March 12) at 4PM ET. However, clubs were allowed starting yesterday (March 10) to contact and begin contract negotiations with the certified agents of players who will become unrestricted free agents upon the expiration of their 2024 contracts at 4PM tomorrow.
Some teams such as the Bills and Browns already made headlines in recent days by signing their own stars to huge extended contracts. Other free agent deals have been agreed to but will not be official until tomorrow.
There was a time as recently as the late 1980s that then-Commissioner Pete Rozelle believed it was advantageous for our successful league to have a quiet time out of the public arena in the off-season. It left fans and the media thirsting for more until the Draft was held and later training camps opened in early July.
However, the 1993 CBA, which included limited free agency with a salary cap, forever changed the NFL landscape. A decade later, Paul Tagliabue, who by then was Rozelle’s successor as Commissioner, also launched NFL Network in 2003. In order to be successful, the brand-new network required news and programming about the league. The free agency signings filled the bill and other networks went on-air and quickly followed NFL Network’s lead. The NFL Network tomorrow will have day-long programming about the free agent signings and rumored signings that sports fans crave.
All the attention that is being paid to our football free agent signings shows why the NFL (even in the so-called off season) continues as the fans’ favorite sport by a large margin.
The NFL salary cap for 2025 is a record $279.2 million for each club. Yes, some of us may believe we were born a generation or more too soon. However, as we often tell our own children and grandchildren, “No one said life is fair”.
We at NFL Alumni only hope that at least a few of the newly-signed and enriched free agents are aware the success of today’s league did not begin just last season but was built on the back of so many of us alumni years ago.
Let the start of the new NFL year begin!
