• Kirk Cousins to the Atlanta Falcons: Cousins has performed capably in recent years but coming off an Achilles tear at his age means this move is one of the riskiest of the offseason.
• Tyron Smith to the New York Jets: Smith will undoubtedly provide New York with a huge upgrade at left tackle when healthy, but the question is how long Smith will be healthy in 2024.
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The NFL has become a lot more savvy when it comes to spending in free agency. Gone are the days of absolutely crazy money thrown around to players with massive bust potential. That’s not to say there still aren’t bad contracts handed out — the New York Giants paid Kenny Golladay a little under $1 million for every pass he caught on the team after signing him in 2021 — but they are harder to come by than they used to be.
Here are the five deals signed this offseason with the biggest boom or bust potential.
Kirk Cousins to the Atlanta Falcons
Cousins has actually been a remarkably consistent quarterback in the NFL since signing with the Minnesota Vikings in 2018. He posted PFF grades ranging between 77.4 and 88.2 while averaging between 7.1 and 8.3 yards per attempt. Additionally, his adjusted completion rate was at least 76.0% every season. For a team like Atlanta with the core of a good team already in place, he made perfect sense as effectively the only high-caliber veteran option available this offseason.
You could argue that Minnesota was right to draw a financial line in the sand and refuse to cross it. As good as Cousins has been, the Vikings were never closer to the Super Bowl with him than they were the season before his arrival when Case Keenum was the quarterback. He wasn’t able to elevate the team enough, and his salary restricted the team from maintaining a championship-caliber roster around him. It was a catch-22, but that wouldn’t be a free-agent bust.
The bust potential comes from his age (36 years old before the season begins), and the fact that he is coming off an Achilles tear suffered last season. Quarterbacks are lasting longer than ever, and Cousins has been known to take care of his body very well, but it would be crazy not to acknowledge that risk.
Tyron Smith to the New York Jets
Tyron Smith showed last season that when he is on the field he is still an elite left tackle — one of the best of his generation. The issue is how much will he be on the field. The 13 regular season games he played were tied for the most he has played since 2018, and the 942 snaps he managed was also his highest total since that season — six years ago.
Smith will massively upgrade the left tackle spot for the Jets when he plays — a vital position protecting the blindside of 40-year-old Aaron Rodgers as he comes back from his Achilles tear — but how much of Smith the Jets actually get is a roll of the dice. If they get a similar result to last season, it will be a success even if they will need to find a contingency plan for a few games, and they will just have to hope that those games aren’t the most important ones of their season.
Nonetheless, they could also just as easily get a season like the year before, where Smith played in only four games and totaled 271 snaps.
Patrick Queen to the Pittsburgh Steelers
Patrick Queen hit free agency coming off back-to-back career years for the Baltimore Ravens. His PFF grade improved to 73.0 last season and his coverage grade to 74.4. He allowed a 96.6 passer rating into his coverage, which doesn’t sound impressive until you understand that the NFL average when targeting linebackers is around 10 points higher than that. Coupled with his elite athleticism and speed, it’s easy to see why the Steelers pursued him as a priority signing, even independent of the bonus of taking a good player away from a division rival.
The red flag is that Queen’s improvement coincides almost perfectly with Roquan Smith‘s arrival in Baltimore. And not just season-to-season. Five of the eight PFF game grades Queen had posted before the Ravens acquired Queen in 2022 had been 56.1 or below. After Smith arrived, he had just two such games and saw an obvious uptick in his best performances as well.
In the two seasons before Smith’s arrival, Queen’s PFF grades were 29.7 and 43.5 overall with coverage grades in the 30s each year.
It seems very likely that Smith had a clear impact on Queen’s play and development, but we don’t know whether that effect is portable or necessitates playing alongside Smith in the same defense. Therein lies the risk for the Steelers.
Danielle Hunter to the Houston Texans
The Houston Texans defied all expectations last season and became a playoff team under new head coach Demeco Ryans with rookie C.J. Stroud under center. They became the first rookie head coach/quarterback combination to achieve that since the Indianapolis Colts in 2012. Judging by this offseason to date, that seems to have changed their strategy a little, and they have been willing to focus a little more on the now rather than the future. Nowhere is that better illustrated than effectively swapping out Jonathan Greenard along the defensive line for free agent Danielle Hunter.
Rarely does a team voluntarily get older and more expensive at a position when the incumbent is a good player, but that’s what the Texans decided to do with Hunter. That is a risk, but it’s not exactly bringing much bust potential. The risk in Hunter is his injury history — which, to be fair, is getting further and further in the rear-view mirror.
He has played 1,970 snaps over the last two seasons, a massive figure, but in the two years before that he played only 384 snaps total and was dealing with multiple serious injuries.
Now 29 years old, if Hunter gets any more significant injuries, the Texans may miss out on the best version of an elite player given his age, while the Vikings chose to bring in the man Hunter will replace on Houston’s defensive line instead.
Saquon Barkley to the Philadelphia Eagles
I love the fit of Saquon Barkley to the Eagles. Philadelphia has had the league’s best offensive line for two straight seasons, and even factoring in the shuffling that will have to happen after Jason Kelce’s retirement, they should at a minimum represent a massive upgrade for Barkley in terms of the blocking in front of him.
Barkley is also clearly immensely talented, and a home run threat any time he touches the football. However, his career to date has also been a case study in the cautionary tale of investing too heavily in running backs. Between injuries and a bad situation, Barkley has rarely been able to make a difference for the Giants while the Eagles got impressive production from the run game out of minimal investment. It’s a curious shift from that team in particular to decide to invest in the position again given what they have shown over the last few seasons.
Barkley absolutely has the potential to prove them right and turbocharge an already good offense. But one random injury and they could be left wondering why they didn’t just plug in a different running back for pennies on the dollar.
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