Ranking the 9 dumbest mistakes so far of 2019 NFL free agency

The official start to the 2019 NFL season began March 13, its 4 p.m. deadline merely a buoy in a whitecap sea of signings, cuts, and trades. All-Pros and future Hall of Famers swapped out their laundry in a tempest of action. Odell Beckham Jr. became a Brown. Le’Veon Bell is now a Jet. Earl Thomas will go from the West Coast’s most storied defense to its East Coast counterpart.

But while we got caught up talking about all the smart trades and signings that dominated headlines in early March, we may have missed the abjectly stupid moves that will give the world something to snark about this summer. A handful of teams and players have made decisions that could wind up working out brilliantly come November, but just look dumb in March.

Those moves are the cold comfort fans who watched beloved stars leave town need right now. And who would we be to deny the schadenfreude that burns at a slow smolder to keep the NFL’s steam engine of hate churning? So here are the dumbest-looking moves that kicked off the 2019 free agent period.

Beasley got $9 million annually to move from the cozy confines of AT&T Stadium to the snow-lined turf of Orchard Park, New York. He’s got the high road here.

Matt Patricia’s putting together a reunion in Detroit. On the first day of free agency, the former New England defensive coordinator swiped defensive lineman Trey Flowers away from the Patriots by offering him the richest overall deal of 2019 so far. He also lured Danny Amendola, unsung hero of multiple New England Super Bowl wins, north after spending a year in Miami. Cornerback Justin Coleman, who broke into the league with the Pats in 2015, followed soon after.

In a vacuum, those are three expensive moves that fill three areas of need in Detroit. But as part of a larger trend it shows Patricia chasing an idea that looks good on paper but rarely works out on the field. Handing big money to the free agents the Patriots are no longer interested in rarely leads to success. In 2018, Mike Vrabel’s Titans threw gobs of cash at Malcolm Butler and Dion Lewis and got a win over New England and a season that ended in Week 17 to show for it. In 2009 and 2010, Josh McDaniels poached away players like Jabar Gaffney, Le Kevin Smith, and Laurence Maroney before flaming out so badly he was fired before he could coach his 29th game.

Detroit just handed out more than $155 million in contracts, $130.5 million of which is going to players Bill Belichick deemed expendable rather than paying. This could be just the boost the Lions’ roster needs — but history suggests trying to be the Patriots anywhere other than New England is a fool’s errand.

Fundamental differences split up the Steelers and the second-leading receiver in franchise history. They also led to the departure of Le’Veon Bell. And Jesse James, a part-time starter who led the team’s tight ends in catch rate in 2018, ran off to the Lions as their prime, non-Patriots addition.

So with several newfound holes to fill in what had been one of the league’s most explosive offenses over the past decade, Pittsburgh went out and got Moncrief, a player who caught 48 passes last fall for a five-win Jaguars team.

The five-year veteran caught only 53.9 percent of the passes thrown his way, which typically could be explained away by the Bortles-ness of his year, but he also failed to crack a 56 percent catch rate in his final two seasons with the Colts.

While JuJu Smith-Schuster has proven he’s capable of filling the team’s needs as a true WR1, his supporting cast is now Moncrief, Eli Rogers (who just re-signed with the team after playing in only three games last season), James Washington, and Ryan Switzer. Smith-Schuster better get used to double-teams.

Cameron Wake has been a great pass rusher for the Miami Dolphins a really long time. But he’s 37 now and finished the 2018 season with six sacks — his lowest total since his first season in the NFL.

So the Titans are really stepping out on a limb by giving him a three-year, $23 million deal that is set to expire a little after Wake’s 40th birthday. It also gives him $10.75 million in guarantees.

If he even gets to six sacks again in 2019, he’d join Julius Peppers and Jason Taylor as the only pass rusher to get more than five sacks at age 37 in the last 17 seasons. Before that, Bruce Smith had nine sacks at age 39 back in 2002.

The likely scenario is that Wake’s best days are in the past and he isn’t going to magically produce better in his late 30s than he did in 2018. If that happens, Tennessee can part with Wake after the 2019 season and eat $2.67 million and $1.33 million cap hits in the next two seasons. The Titans should probably be prepared for that to come to fruition.

Alex Smith’s huge drain on the salary cap left Washington in a jam when it came to finding a quarterback to start in 2019. The team’s crafty solution was a trade for Case Keenum, who will only count $3.5 million against the cap in 2019.

Those savings were perfect for a team that needed to address its interior offensive line, its inability to stop the run, and its lack of wide receivers. Instead, Washington gave $84 million to a safety.

Landon Collins is a very good safety. He’s a three-time Pro Bowler who should help in run support. But it left the team without much wiggle room for other free agency moves. Washington had a bottom-five offense and an average defense in 2018, and now it looks pretty much the same.

Jon Gruden needed to make a splash to build some excitement following a thoroughly depressing 2018 season in Oakland. His Raiders went through an impressive teardown en route to a 4-12 season, and talent was sorely needed on both sides of the ball.

So Gruden and general manager Mike Mayock went to work this offseason. They freed Antonio Brown from Pittsburgh for the low cost of third- and fifth-round picks. They also threw unheard of gobs of money at a player so lightly regarded just 11 months earlier that the 49ers, another talent-hungry team, gave him up for a 40-pick draft swap.

Trent Brown signed a four-year, $66 million contract with the Raiders that makes him the highest-paid blocker in league history. In 2020, more than $21 million of the team’s salary cap space — more than 10 percent of the team’s total spending — will be dedicated to one blocker who was San Francisco’s right tackle in 2016 and 2017 and only locked in his starting role as the Patriots’ left tackle after rookie Isaiah Wynn was lost for the season with a torn Achilles.

While Brown was part of a world champion offensive line that allowed Brady to be sacked only once in the postseason, his regular-season resume wasn’t especially impressive. He was flagged for holding seven times last fall and rated out as Pro Football Focus’s 37th-ranked pass blocker. Brown is still very much a work in progress, which is probably not something you want to hear about the player you just handed a record-setting contract.

Trent Brown parlayed three years of solid play and one massive postseason performance into a big deal. Bengals right tackle Bobby Hart didn’t need either of those to re-up with Cincinnati on a three-year deal worth up to $21 million.

This was not a well-received deal. The Bengals have felt enough pressure about the Hart signing to start issuing responses to individual fans’ complaints, which is equal parts impressive and concerning.

But that’s not the only move aimed at keeping a mediocre core intact in southwestern Ohio. Tight end C.J. Uzomah capitalized on the most productive year of his NFL career (43 catches, 439 yards) and signed up for three more years in orange and black. Linebacker Preston Brown did the same despite missing nine games last fall — his first season with the team.

Even Uzomah thinks there’s more work to be done on the open market.

Signing Uzomah and Brown aren’t bad moves, but the Bengals are starting a new era without Marvin Lewis by giving new head coach Zac Taylor a roster that looks A LOT like the one that went 6-10 in 2018. Bringing a high-profile free agent to town would have given Cincinnati something to get excited about. Instead the Bengals are getting a control group in an experiment to determine just exactly how bad Lewis was.

Nick Foles is a great Eagles quarterback. He is Captain America without his Super Soldier Serum wearing anyone else’s uniform. To wit:

Foles was significantly worse when he wasn’t wearing green and white, even for a pair of teams that offered him better protection in the pocket. But the Jaguars, suffering through the Stockholm Syndrome of five years propping up Blake Bortles at quarterback Weekend at Bernie’s style, took one look at those numbers and said “yes, please.”

Jacksonville signed Foles to a four-year, $88 million deal Wednesday, giving him more than $50 million in guarantees in the process. So how does a non-Eagles Foles measure up to the since-released Bortles?

Oh noooooooooo.

A week ago, the Giants had a 28-year-old pass rusher with 51 career sacks, a 26-year-old receiver with 44 career touchdowns, and a 25-year-old safety with three straight Pro Bowl nods. Now Olivier Vernon, Odell Beckham Jr., and Landon Collins are all gone.

Instead of building around those premium players, the Giants instead have a roster that looks like it’s being built to win games in the 1960s.

The quarterback for the team — at least for now — is still Eli Manning, and it looks like the plan is to give the ball to Saquon Barkley 50 times a game.

New York added Kevin Zeitler, Jabrill Peppers, Golden Tate, and a first-round pick. But they also got $24 million in dead money by parting with Vernon and Beckham. No matter how you cut it, free agency was a net loss for a team that was already bad.