NFL free agency: If you won, you likely lost

Winning in NFL free agency is usually fool’s gold.

For the most part, National Football League free agency is over for the 2016 offseason. Once again, we watched as teams spent in excess of $1 billion on the first day of the period, throwing around money as though it was a high stakes game of Monopoly.

Predictably, the talking heads counted up the money spent by each team and declared the highest spenders as winners of the period. In reality, those are the teams that will be cutting players and eating ample dead money on the salary cap in the next few seasons.

We watched desperate general managers make wild deals, hoping to catch the proverbial lightning in a bottle. In Miami, Mike Tannenbaum and Dennis Hickey combined to give us a head-scratching week, bringing in Mario Williams while allowing Olivier Vernon to leave town. More on Vernon later. The Dolphins also signed offensive tackle Jermon Bushrod, who is either going to displace left tackle Branden Albert (who signed a massive five-year, $47 million deal in 2014) or Ju’Wuan James, who was a first-round pick that same year.

Vernon is homegrown talent who literally played his entire life in the Miami-Dade County region. He should have been locked up by Hickey but instead was allowed to hit the market because of massive deals handed out to Ndamukong Suh in 2015 and to a lesser extent, Williams this March. Vernon then cashed in with the New York Giants, a team normally seen as frugal.

New York general manager Jerry Reece knows h is on the verge of being ousted after missing the playoffs four straight seasons, so he went for broke. Reece signed Vernon to an embarrassing five-year deal worth $85 million with $52.5 million guaranteed. The money is record-setting for a defensive end and has more guarantees than J.J. Watt or Justin Houston received.

Vernon is a good player who should have been paid as such, but instead was handed a check signifying his elite status. In his four NFL seasons, Vernon has 29 sacks in 64 games.

New York also spent lavishly on cornerback Janoris Jenkins, giving him a five-year contract worth $62.5 million with $28.8 million in guarantees. Jenkins then promptly told reporters that his first order of business was to stop being lazy at the end of games. Yikes.

Both Miami and New York have been lauded as winners of this offseason, but neither will sniff the playoffs in 2016 and beyond. The issue is two-fold. One, spending large sums of money on players who are closing in on 30 years old means declining value and diminishing returns. Two, these men are coming from other systems and now have to learn yours. It is starting new again while expectations are skyrocketing. Not a good combination.

The smartest teams in football spend money to re-sign their own players and then draft well, followed with a coaching staff that can develop those younger players. If you look at the eight teams which reached the Divisional Round last year, none have made any splashes by signing outside players, with the lone exception being right tackle Mitchell Schwartz going to the Kansas City Chiefs.

In the final analysis, the NFL free agency period is the one time that it pays to lose.