This is the athletic football show.

Welcome to the athletic football show.

I'm Robert Mays.

Great show for you guys today.

Dane Bruegler is going to be joining us a little bit later. We're going to talk with Dane about the ways that free agency shaped the draft. Obviously, any mock drafts done before the last two weeks, there's going to be some changes. Deems filled needs. There's been a shifting landscape as it relates to the draft. So, really had a good conversation with Dane about how some of

these moves and how some of the money spent could shape the way that the early part of the draft

specifically is going to look. But before we get to Dane, though, I wanted to have a conversation

about just some of the big picture lessons we can learn from free agency as it applies to the NFL

at large, what some of these signings mean

what they mean for certain positions obviously we spent all week last week reacting to these

things in real time and trying to give some input about what those signings meant for the teams

but now that we have some distance from it i wanted to zoom out and chat about some big picture

lessons and the person i wanted to have this discussion with is someone who's done a phenomenal job of breaking down all things for agency over at PFF. And that is the salary cap analyst for pro football focus. It's Brett Spielberger. Brett, how you doing, man? I'm doing fantastic. How you doing? I'm doing very, very well. You and I have been talking about a lot of these signings privately over the last week or so, because if people don't know, you're also a Bears fan. And I think that you and I have been more plugged into this offseason than we've probably been to any off season for like three years because the stakes are real again. So I figured it was just time to have that conversation that we were

having in private and just bring it to a public forum as we took a step back and chatted about

what free agency can teach us here. Yeah, just convert the DMs into a podcast. I think it's a great

idea. And actually, I'm excited to hear what Dane says. I think the biggest thing, and we'll get into

it a little bit, but the kind of thing people need to understand more and more is the relatedness between free agency and the draft. We learned so many lessons from that first week. So I'm excited to hear what he has to say. So let's dig into this. The first question I wanted to ask you, and we can go a bunch of different directions and I'm sure there'll be a bunch of answers to this. But as you look at the contracts handed out over the last two weeks, which deals do you think have told us the most about the landscape of the NFL?

Yeah, so the league at large, I think you are just seeing the continued growth of the interior of both trench units.

So first, obviously, those defensive tackles, we obviously had some indications, but I do think the big thing that happened this offseason was Aaron Donald, shout out to the legend.

Thanks for everything, Aaron.

You know, had this outlier deal that was so often the stratosphere in its own tier above 30 million.

And every player besides him was 22 23 24 even just the medici

...