This is where you’ll find out how good these first free agent deals are: in two years.
That’s when you’ll see if the teams are cutting the players who signed this year to free up space to hire more players, or keeping them for the duration of their contracts because they worked so well.
Therefore, we will avoid classifying Jets’ free agent hires for the time being. No one, not even general manager Joe Douglas, knows how this is going to work. But what we can assess is the logic of the decisions they made, especially with the two great free agents with whom they reached agreements on Monday night.
The list of Jets needs a lot of help. Douglas wisely wants to build from scratch. But he won’t be able to fill all the holes with the draft, so he had to dive into the free agent market. He didn’t just throw money around, however.
Douglas identified edge rusher and wide receiver as two positions in this market that had more talent than normal, because the reduced salary cap forced teams to make some tough decisions and prevented some players who would normally get the franchise brand from taking it.
Then he examined two players, Corey Davis and Carl Lawson, who would not seek the best contracts in their position and were also young (both will be 26 years old on the day of their debut) enough that their best football is ahead of them.
Davis and Lawson are intriguing players because the Jets are betting on production potential. In a way, it’s reminiscent of the draft, when you take a player without much experience but loaded with talent, waiting for him to develop. They gave Lawson a guaranteed $ 30 million, and he never had double-digit bags. They gave Davis a guaranteed $ 27 million, and he never had 1,000 yards in one season.
The tricky part of the free agency is identifying why a player is a free agent. The best players rarely see free agency. Their teams maintain them through long-term agreements or franchise branding. It is usually age, ineffective gambling or bad habits that lead a player to enter the open market. Good GMs must identify why players are free and then decide if there is an opportunity there.
Bengals made an effort to keep Lawson. He probably hit the market because Bengals didn’t want to structure the contract the way he wanted to. They revolved around broker Trey Hendrickson and paid him the same $ 15 million a year that Lawson received, but for four years instead of three.
Lawson is an intriguing player. He is a darling of the analysis class, but he did not present large numbers of sack. He has only 20 sacks in four seasons and has not become a staunch player for Bengals until last year. But the review site Pro Football Focus ranked him 14th out of 109 edge rushers in 2020. Although he only had 5.5 sacks last year, he affected the quarterback. He was fourth in pressures (64) and second in QB hits (24) among edge rushers, by PFF.
The Jets hope that, by putting him in line with Quinnen Williams, new coach Robert Saleh will have a great run of passes.
Lawson is in an interesting position now. He is no longer a choice for the fourth round in Cincinnati, where any production he has would be seen as a bonus, for a well-paid free agent who will receive questions every week if he is not fired.
Davis has already lived with the pressure of being the fifth overall choice in 2017. It won’t be new for him. The question for Davis is whether he can continue to improve after a career year in 2020 (65 caches, 984 yards, five touchdowns) and whether he can move from being a complement to AJ Brown to being the No. 1 receiver of the Jets.
It is difficult to challenge Douglas’s plan now. He signed two young players on the rise for reasonable contracts. We can meet here in two years to see how it works.