We’re in the gap right now between free agency and the draft, which means we’ve got Aaron Rodgers and the owners meetings to fill in the blank. Since I’m on the ground in Florida now, we’ll start off this week’s takeaways with a guide to what’s going to happen here …
Potential rule changes
The idea of the 18-game season will probably be the biggest news peg of this set of meetings. The NFLPA, both at the Super Bowl and the combine, has fired preemptive strikes against the addition of another week to the regular season, going back on the more conciliatory tone executive director Lloyd Howell struck on an 18-game schedule in the past. And the NFL hasn’t been outwardly forceful about the topic quite yet.
But if you start digging, you’ll find some pieces already in place.
First, there’s the opt out in the television deals, which allow the league to bail from most of its agreements, save for its deal with Disney, after the 2029 season. (In the case of Disney, it’s after ’30.) That means having a new set of contracts in place for ’30, which would have to be negotiated a year or two ahead of time.
Second, there’s Super Bowl LXII in Atlanta. We have dates for next year’s Super Bowl in Santa Clara (Feb. 8, 2026) and the year after in Inglewood (Feb. 14, 2027). But Atlanta organizers, nearly six months after being awarded the February ’28 game, haven’t been given a date. This isn’t a no-harm, no-foul thing for them—not having the exact dates has forced the city to block off convention and hotel space for nearly the entire month to accommodate the NFL, which hamstrings other city planning.
On Sunday morning, I asked a longtime NFC team exec when he thought 18 games would come and he guessed two years. For the reasons above, 2027 makes sense as a target for the NFL, though it still would have to be negotiated with the players. It would allow for the league to go to the market to sell the broadcast rights with the new calendar in place and, presumably, some things such as the deployment of bye weeks (the networks have been staunchly against the idea of multiple bye weeks in the past) worked out.
Hat tip to Yahoo’s Charles Robinson for his reporting on 18 games a couple of days ago, too. Here’s a little more on what to expect over the next couple of days …
• The normal rules changes. We covered these possibilities in last Tuesday’s notes, with the headliners being proposals to ban the tush push, remove the automatic first down from defensive holding and illegal contact penalties, make permanent the new kickoff (with the touchback moved out to the 35 to encourage more returns), change playoff seeding to do it strictly by record rather than giving the top four seeds in each conference to division winners, and expand the scope of the replay assist (on plays where a flag’s been thrown).
• International games will be a big topic, with the NFL closing in on its short-term goal of having eight games annually outside the United States, so each team would go every other year, and give up a home game once every four years. There will be seven international games in 2025—three in London and one each in Dublin, Madrid, São Paulo and Berlin.
• Time is allotted on the agenda to discuss the future of NFL+ and NFL Films. There’s also a vote to extend the Thursday Night Football flex for another year. The league used it once last year (moving Denver Broncos vs. Los Angeles Chargers to TNF in December) after approving it for the first time in 2023.
• There will also be votes on the funding for the stadiums going up in Buffalo and Nashville, and time set aside to discuss the NFL’s social responsibility initiative, with a women’s forum (Caitlin Clark and Serena Williams will be part of a panel on flag football) and updates on progress in hiring as part of the league’s plan.
Of course, other things will pop up, too, with all the NFL’s general managers and head coaches at The Breakers, and the great majority of them scheduled to talk on the record over the course of everyone’s three days in South Florida.
New York Giants
The New York Giants are making the best of a tough situation. They went all-in on Matthew Stafford and were fully willing to part with draft picks, and provide a contract near the top of the quarterback market, to get him. They had their hat in the ring for Aaron Rodgers, too.
Here’s the reality of the situation: The Giants have been to the playoffs twice in the 13 seasons since winning Super Bowl XLVI. They’ve had double-digit losses in nine of the past 11 seasons. The offensive line has been a mess. Widespread perception holds that everyone on the football side there is fighting for their jobs—perception which ownership has acknowledged.
None of that helps if you’re pursuing a sought-after quarterback.
The Giants are victims of the circumstances they’ve generated for themselves, which has made East Rutherford a less-attractive destination than the Pittsburgh Steelers or Minnesota Vikings for Rodgers, and less enticing than staying home with the Los Angeles Rams for Stafford. Given all that, I’m O.K. with how they’re coming out of this.
Russell Wilson’s contract has $10 million guaranteed, $10.5 million in base pay, and incentives based on personal and team achievement that can take him to $21 million in total (it’d take a historic season to get all the way there). Jameis Winston signed a two-year deal, with $4 million in base pay, and an incentive structure similar to what the Giants gave Drew Lock and Tyrod Taylor the past few years.
At a baseline, that’s less than $15 million. Tommy DeVito is now the third-stringer. They don’t have to force anything in a draft that features one of the weaker quarterback classes of the past decade. They still have money to spend, and five of the top 105 picks in April.
They could still take Shedeur Sanders at No. 3. Or they could take Travis Hunter there, then take Jaxson Dart, Quinn Ewers, Jalen Milroe or Tyler Shough on the draft’s second night. They don’t, for that matter, have to take a quarterback at all, and could use the picks to surround whichever veteran winds up being the 2025 starter. While Wilson enters the offseason program the likely starter, the Giants, internally, are committed to playing the best guy.
From there, you can go to another truth on these Giants. They’re not winning the Super Bowl this year. Sanders won’t take them there. Neither will Dart or Ewers—or Wilson or Winston for that matter. But what they can be, as I see it, is a factor in the NFC East. And considering it’s Year 4 for Brian Daboll and Joe Schoen, jobs will probably depend on that being the case. So the temptation would be there, were it just DeVito on the roster, to bring aboard a rookie simply to raise the floor for the team. That’s also the wrong reason to draft a quarterback.
You take one early to raise the ceiling on a franchise, not the floor. What Wilson and Winston can do is get the floor to a place where you don’t need a rookie to set it. Signing those two, creates the flexibility the Giants need to get to, say, eight or nine wins, and keep the program going, while knowing they can wait for someone such as Penn State’s Drew Allar, LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier or Clemson’s Cade Klubnik next year.
I don’t hate the strategy at all.
Abdul Carter
Abdul Carter’s strategy for meeting with teams clearly establishes where this draft class sits. Penn State’s pro day was Friday, and though he didn’t work out, due to the shoulder he’s still rehabbing, he made good use of the NFL being in town—dining with Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam and GM Andrew Berry Thursday, then spending Friday afternoon meeting with the Giants (who sent, among others, an outside linebackers coach).
Carter took those two meetings, and those two meetings only, during his trip back to campus for the pro day. He’s already had 30 visits with the Tennessee Titans and Browns, and only has visits to the New England Patriots’ and Giants’ facilities left.
That telegraphs Carter’s confidence that he’ll be among the first four picks, and that confidence is well-founded. Going back to December and January, a consensus has crystallized among NFL teams that the Penn State star and Colorado Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter were a cut above the pack in this year’s class. Miami’s Cam Ward has established himself as the top quarterback, and Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders might be the one guy who stops Ward, Carter and Hunter from going 1-2-3 in some order.
So with the Sanders wild card factored in, it seems very unlikely Carter (or Hunter, for that matter) will get past the Patriots at No. 4. New England has bigger needs than the ones Hunter and Carter would address, but that pick is way too valuable to press a need with, unless that need is at quarterback, and even then it’d be questionable.
And, yes, Carter and Hunter are that good.
But the truth is, the drop-off is also indicative of the “cliff” coming earlier this year, with a sizable clump of players—LSU OT Will Campbell, Missouri OT Armand Membou, Georgia LB Jalon Walker and DE Mykel Williams, Boise State RB Ashton Jeanty, Michigan DT Mason Graham and Penn State TE Tyler Warren are among those in that cluster—in more of the red-chip category after Hunter and Carter come off the board.
Jaxson Dart
While we’re there, I don’t think Jaxson Dart is much behind Sanders. In fact, with less than a month to go, it sure feels like the consensus might be that Sanders is closer to the Ole Miss star than he is to Ward in the teams’ pecking order.
Part of that is because Ward has started to pull away. Another is that Dart’s making up ground.
Let’s look at some of the facts …
• Over the past two years, Dart threw for 7,643 yards, 52 touchdowns and 11 picks.
• The Rebels won double-digit games in consecutive years for the first time since 1959 and ’60.
• At the combine, he measured out 6'2" and 223 pounds (taller and heavier than Sanders).
And Dart was probably the best quarterback at the Senior Bowl, backed up what the scouts saw in Mobile by throwing it well in Indianapolis, then did so again at his pro day in Oxford on Friday.
“I wasn’t impressed with his size, he’s not long-levered, he doesn’t have big hands,” said one coach who was on hand, and compared him physically to Baker Mayfield (with a little less arm strength). “But he threw the s--- out of the deep ball. That was really, really good. The velocity’s good, not great. The arm strength’s there. He struggled a little going to his left—some guys get closed off to their left, and wasn’t great on the run.
“But there were some wow throws. It was a good day. If you’re in the market, the guy’s got the moxie, the swag, he’s a top-25-or-so pick.”
Accordingly, that’s not to say that he’s suddenly changing the dynamic of what’s a lackluster class, because most folks I’ve talked to like him more than they love him.
And no one’s saying he’s going first overall.
“He’s a good, scrappy player,” texted one AFC college scouting director, who called him a less-athletic version of Kenny Pickett. “Tough, throws it well enough, doesn’t have a major hole to his game. There’s just no elite trait.”
“He’s still developing,” texted another AFC college director. “Not a finished product. Coming from a simplistic college offense, but he has all the tools to be a starter in time. Not someone you’d want to throw into the starter role from Day 1, but if you have the luxury of sitting him for a year and letting him develop, he’s got starter talent.”
The Ole Miss folks would tell you that Lane Kiffin’s offense has become progressively more pro-style over Dart’s three years there, to the point where Dart had plenty of control in 2024, even if the offense still moved fast and had spread elements.
Regardless, the real x-factor actually may be who Dart is. The people at Ole Miss rave about him, believing he’s got the it factor a guy needs to lead an NFL team, and the drive and determination to earn the right to do just that. He’d been something of a pied piper for the Rebels the past couple of years, building bonds with players in every corner of the locker room (one coach there for pro day noted how he addressed all the equipment guys shagging balls for him by name), and using those relationships to bring the team with him.
He’s also a quarterback built thick like a linebacker, with a live arm and enough athleticism.
The question then, given that talent level, is how far he can take all of this. But that’s sort of the same question facing Sanders. It’ll be interesting hearing those two compared over the next month or so.
Stefon Diggs
Sometimes contracts tell you where the league is on a player—and such was the case with Stefon Diggs this week. Now, to be sure, this was a much-needed signing by the Patriots. I also love Diggs as a player, and as we detailed last week, I also think, when channeled correctly, he can be incredible for the younger guys around him in New England.
But the contract is the contract. What it’s not is what it was advertised to be—a three-year, $69 million deal with $26 million guaranteed. Here are the real details …
• Diggs’s base pay is $63.5 million over three years. The additional $5.5 million to account for is his incentives package, which requires he ascend back into the upper echelon at his position. Even the $63.5 million can be a tad deceiving—$6.8 million of it is tied up in per-game roster bonuses, and he needs to be healthy enough to play to collect those. Half that number in per-game roster bonuses, $3.4 million, comes this year, as he returns from an ACL tear. Meaning if he misses, say, the first four games of the year, it’ll cost him $800,000.
• The guarantees create a scenario where this is really a one-year deal with two team options on the back end. He got $12 million to sign, and another $2.9 million in a fully guaranteed base salary. Outside of that, just $1.7 million is fully guaranteed. That’s a part of his $20.6 million base salary for 2026, and it’s subject to offsets. So the Patriots can easily bail.
• The Patriots will have to make a decision early next year, with a $6 million injury guarantee scheduled to vest as fully guaranteed in March 2026, which will kick up his ’26 guarantee to $7.7 million if New England chooses to go forward with it. (If he gets hurt again, of course, he’d be protected in this case.
• His cash flow is $18.5 million this year, and $22.5 million next year and again in 2027.
• The $500,000 incentives are at 70, 80, 90 and 100 catches, and 1,000, 1,100, 1,200 and 1,300 yards this year, which can add $4 million to this year and get him to that $22.5 million he has for the next two years. There are also $500,000 for making the Pro Bowl each year.
So, basically, if he goes for 100 catches and 1,300 yards and makes the Pro Bowl, and plays in every game this year, he’ll make $23 million. Presumably, in that case, the Patriots would happily go forward with the contract for 2026.
But if he struggles coming back from the injury? New England can walk away.
That this was the best deal Diggs could find, and that he had to go to a non-contending team to find it, tells you there’s some doubt on what he will be in 2025.
Tackle contracts
Conversely, in the final analysis, the tackle contracts tell us a rosier story. That one being that if you’re a good player at that position, you’re gonna get rewarded—and continue to get rewarded.
Let’s use the case of Cam Robinson as an example. He was traded midseason last year. His play with the Minnesota Vikings, after that trade from Jacksonville Jaguars, collapsed down the stretch. The team employing the coach he’s spent the most time with, the Patriots (who have Doug Marrone as their offensive line coach), had a huge need at the position and didn’t really go after him. And he lingered on the market for a week with his 30th birthday looming.
Yet, a week and a half ago, the Houston Texans dug into their pockets and gave him $10.75 million fully guaranteed. There’s another $1.25 million in per-game roster bonuses. And if he’s a starter for the duration of the season, and stays healthy, he’ll make $14 million.
Again, if you look at how Robinson played at the end of the year, that’s pretty wild. And the Texans affirmed that by getting some more insurance thereafter in signing Trent Brown.
This is along the same lines as the Kansas City Chiefs rolling the dice with a two-year, $30 million deal for the San Francisco 49ers’ Jaylon Moore, based on how he played in spot duty. It’s right there with Dan Moore Jr., a middling, workmanlike tackle for the Pittsburgh Steelers, getting a four-year, $84 million from the Titans, who did it, in part, to find an answer at left tackle and move JC Latham over to his more natural position on the right side.
The bottom line is the NFL doesn’t have enough of these guys, so if you can even play a little, you’re gonna get paid a lot, particularly in an era when defensive linemen get more and more freakish by the year.
Running backs
How the running backs fall in the draft promises to be a very real litmus test for the position going forward. This year’s class has all the elements. You have two players at the top—in Boise State’s Jeanty and North Carolina’s Omarion Hampton—who are worthy of coming off the board in the first round. You’ve got a rock-solid second tier, with Ohio State’s TreVeyon Henderson and Quinshon Judkins, and Iowa’s Kaleb Johnson. And you have real depth after that.
You’re also coming off a year in which the face of the position changed, with the Philadelphia Eagles, Green Bay Packers and Baltimore Ravens—three very smart football operations—scoring big in poaching veteran running backs Saquon Barkley, Josh Jacobs and Derrick Henry from the Giants, Las Vegas Raiders and Titans, respectively (all now picking in the top six). You also have a recent case, in the Detroit Lions and Jahmyr Gibbs, of a playoff team hitting on a draft gamble at the position.
So if you’re the Raiders, Chicago Bears or Dallas Cowboys, and you have a need, do you bet on elite talent and do what the Lions did two years ago? Or do you wait, knowing that the position has always been one where you can find talent deeper in the draft, and that guys such as Arizona State’s Cam Skattebo, Tennessee’s Dylan Sampson and UCF’s RJ Harvey will be around a lot later in the draft?
It’s a fun question to ponder.
It’ll be fascinating to see what happens. Particularly since the difference between going No. 6 (Raiders) and No. 12 (Cowboys) this year projects to be over $10 million ($31.77 million vs. $20.19 million) over the four years of a rookie contract.
Trading down
Trading down is going to be really tough once Carter and Hunter are gone. You hear a lot of scouts say there’s really nice depth in this year’s class, where there might not be much of a drop-off from the middle of the first round all the way into the early parts of Day 3. The unspoken piece of that: There’s not a huge difference between the fifth pick and 15th or 20th pick either.
And so if the two truly elite guys are off the board in the top three picks, outside of some team getting really hot after Sanders, I’m not sure that someone would be trading up with the Patriots at No. 4, the Jaguars at No. 5 or the Raiders at No. 6.
The problem? For every Tyler Warren, there’s a Colston Loveland. For every Jalon Walker, there’s a Mykel Williams or Shemar Stewart. For every Mason Graham, there’s a Walter Nolen. For every Jahdae Barron, there’s a Will Johnson. For every Ashton Jeanty, there’s an Omarion Hampton. For every Will Campbell, there’s an Armand Membou.
Bottom line, I don’t know what the motivator is going to be to create movement in the top half of the first round. Which means, less than a month out, we could be looking at the early stages of the draft having drama because of the unknown, but not a ton of movement.
Aaron Rodgers
The Steelers seem content to wait on Aaron Rodgers. The possibility does exist that Rodgers will up and decide to retire. He could string this thing out to see what the Vikings wind up doing.
The reality is, this is Rodgers’s call, and I don’t think that there’s any “camp” or “circle” to this one.
My sense, from talking to the teams that have been involved, is that their lack of a sense for when or how this is going down relates right back to the quarterback looking to make the decision on his own. He has an agent, David Dunn. He has friends across the NFL. But it’s never been his way to start polling people on what he should do.
So here we are, a day away from April, with a decision potentially coming in 10 hours, 10 days or 10 weeks. The last time around, the white smoke didn’t emerge from the chapel until the Monday of draft week—but that was more about the Packers and New York Jets working out trade terms than anything on Rodgers’s end. This time, it’s really up to one man and one man alone, and Pittsburgh is waiting on him.
The reward could be great. But if the Steelers get left at the altar, the remaining options are slim.
Quick-hitters
With the meetings starting, let’s fire through the quick-hitters. Here we go …
• Matthew Stafford’s contract still isn’t done yet. Why? Well, one reason explained to me, and this is just part of it, is the one-year rule—if a team renegotiates a player’s contract, as the Rams did last July with Stafford, then they have to wait 12 months to give him another raise. There are ways around this (they could give him an extension), but it definitely limits what they can do with the current terms of the deal.
• Credit to the Ravens for getting a low-drama negotiation with John Harbaugh done under the radar—a lot of folks didn’t even realize he was headed into a contract year. Owner Steve Bisciotti, who likes to stay off center stage with the team, bought 49% of the franchise in 2000 and became majority owner in ’04, has only hired one coach, and that one coach was just extended through ’28. That, by the way, would be Harbaugh’s 21st year in Baltimore. Fair to say that Bisciotti got that hire right.
• Ja’Whaun Bentley being released this week leaves Joe Cardona as the last Patriot who won a Super Bowl with the franchise. It’s kind of fitting that the last Belichick guy is the long-snapper he drafted out of Navy.
• For what it’s worth, I think Deion Sanders will be like Archie Manning when it comes to being an NFL quarterback’s dad. Manning, you’ll remember, played the bad guy for his son Eli, who forced a trade that put him with the Giants, rather than the Chargers, in 2004. Folks back then wondered whether Archie would loiter in front of Eli’s career. He didn’t. In fact, he was rarely heard from in that context again. I’d bet Deion will take a similar step back, once he knows Shedeur is happy and taken care of in his NFL city.
• We’d written over the past couple of weeks how the situation between the New Orleans Saints and Derek Carr was worth keeping an eye on—then how the team maxing out his restructure (taking his base salary to the minimum and converting the difference into a signing bonus) probably dashed any chance of a trade. What it didn’t dash, though, was the idea New Orleans could draft a quarterback. And along those lines, that Saints coach Kellen Moore was personally at Dart’s pro day isn’t insignificant.
• Also at Dart’s pro day was Browns coach Kevin Stefanski, which raises the idea that the Browns could take Carter at No. 2, then grab the Ole Miss star either at the top of the second round or through a trade up back into the bottom of the first round. Stefanski was there on his way to Palm Beach—and missed Cleveland’s dinner with Carter as a result of the trip.
• I’m really excited to see what J.J. McCarthy can do in the spring. I also have no problem, and particularly because of the makeup of the Vikings’ roster (it’s a veteran, win-now bunch), with Minnesota wanting him to earn the job. I think it’s good for the older players, with so much on the line for that group coming off a 14-win season, to know their young quarterback had to earn his playing time.
• This Micah Parsons thing feels like it’s going to drag into July. And it doesn’t have to.
• The clips of like three bad throws from Will Howard’s combine workout is a good example of everything that’s wrong with social media nowadays. No context. Just posted to dunk on a guy, and create bad perception, for the sake of the likes and retweets.
• The next big pro day for your calendars is Friday at Colorado. We’ll see to what extent Sanders and Hunter wind up actually working out.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as What to Expect From This Week’s NFL Owners Meetings.