This is the athletic football show.

Welcome to the athletic football show.

I'm Robert Mays.

Fun show for you guys today.

We are officially

in the pre-free agency period here. So we are getting ready to break down all the players

that are available, where they might go, all that stuff. And I could think of no better way

to start wading into those waters than with the athletics free agency expert himself.

My good buddy, Shia, how you doing, man?

For better or worse, I guess, right? It feels like every year, March 1st comes around and I'm like,

whoa, we got like two weeks to form, you know, we've watched all these guys, but you have to sort of,

you know, really form your opinions. What are they worth? Where would they fit? All those different

things. So this will be a good exercise for both of us, I think. So for people that don't know, you go through and you do a top 50 free agents list. Even before I worked here, it was a pretty consistent resource for me. Now that I'm here, it's a tab that's open in my browser constantly. So you went and rank them. And we're going to talk about not every player on that list. That would be a six hour podcast. But I want to get into some of the guys at the top of the list. And then some of the positions that are a little flush. And then just look at free agency approach within those positions. Do you want to go at the high end? Do you want to see if you can get a bargain? So using a couple markers, whether they be edge rushers, wide receivers, to give us a window into some thinking about this free agent class. So let's start with a bit of free agent news that happened earlier today about, I don't know, three or four hours before we started recording this. I've already talked to Aaron Reese on a breaking news podcast about it, but JJ Watt signs with the Cardinals. So a bit of a dark course, you know, not a team that had typically been connected to him to this point in the process. A lot of people had said that he was probably going to end up with a contender. Whether you would put the Cardinals in that group is something we can talk about here in a second. But what was your initial reaction when you heard about the Watt contract and how much it got from Arizona? I was surprised. You know, like you mentioned, they were not a team on my radar as somebody who might make a play for him. And even the salary, you know, I looked at it and I thought, all right, there, the Texans are releasing him because he's got one year, 17 and a half million. And I know whenever that happens, the team usually floats out there. Well, we wanted to do right by the player and all this stuff. And, you know, usually, sometimes it's the case, but usually I roll my eyes and think, well, you know, no, I don't think anyone's going to pay him 17 and a half million. So to get two years, 31 million, that was higher than I

anticipated. You know, this is like the definition to me of a boom or bust signing. Certainly,

he's still a very good player when he plays, but this is somebody who missed 32 games from

2016 to 2019 and is now,

what, 32 years old. So it could work out for him. I still think, like I said, he's very

effective when he plays. But I was a little bit surprised that Arizona thought this was their

best use of financial resources. It's funny. We talked about this in the pot with Aaron. If you look at what the Cardinals were last year on defense, they were this kind of blitz-happy, throw-it-all-together pass rush. It wasn't relying on guys who were true number one players, even though Hassan Reddick was very good for them. But it looked like a defense that was trying to have a piecemeal way to get after the passer. A lot of blitzing, a lot of stunts, all of that.

Now they have these two highly paid pass rushers and the guys that they used to piece together the passers last year are free agents like Reddick.

So they're almost going to do this really crazy and quick 180 in terms of how they approach rushing the pastor next year, possibly, with Watt and Chandler Jones there. So it's going to be interesting to see stylistically how they may pivot with these two guys. If you look at the money, I agree it's a lot. And the injury thing, I always forget, like, guys get hurt. Like, what I'm seeing with

the Wolf forward, who we'll talk about later today, it's like, I got to remember. It's not

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