Culture
NFL free-agency superlatives: The best and the most puzzling moves so far
We’ve completed four days of NFL free agency, and nearly 100 of my top 150 players have come off the board, in addition to dozens of other signings and a handful of trades. Here are my biggest takeaways from the first week of the new league year.
Live updates: Free-agent news from across the NFL
FA tracker: New teams and contract details for the top 150 free agents
Best available players: Who’s still on the market?
Grades: Best and worst of free-agent deals
Losing four front-seven players from your roster could be devastating for many teams. Vikings edge players Danielle Hunter, D.J. Wonnum and Marcus Davenport and linebacker Jordan Hicks all left for various deals elsewhere.
But Minnesota had a plan, replacing them with Jonathan Greenard (two years younger than Hunter), Andrew Van Ginkel (young, ascending player) and Blake Cashman, whose football IQ, range and ability to slip blocks make him a three-down inside linebacker and an upgrade over Hicks. That trio gives the Vikings a better package on defense moving forward than what walked out the door. Sometimes plans have to be fluid, and the Vikings’ decision-makers made me a believer in their evaluation skills, which I’d had some doubt about previously.
I also like the pivot to Sam Darnold for $10 million on a one-year deal while letting Kirk Cousins leave for $45 million per year over four years in Atlanta. The money saved can still be put to use by upgrading their third wide receiver spot and extending wideout Justin Jefferson.
GO DEEPER
Kirk Cousins’ departure shifts Vikings’ team-building plan into new phase
Without a doubt, it has to be what GM Jason Licht has done over the past week with the Buccaneers’ roster. No GM has protected his roster and re-signed his core guys like Licht. After tagging Pro Bowl safety Antoine Winfield Jr., he re-signed quarterback Baker Mayfield and wide receiver Mike Evans and found a way to keep linebacker Lavonte David. Licht also brought back defensive tackle Greg Gaines and safety Jordan Whitehead, who was on the Super Bowl champion team in 2020. The band is back together just in the nick of time.
Bucs GM Jason Licht has called this be of “the greatest free agent hauls of all-time” to re-sign players such as Mike Evans, Antoine Winfield Jr., Lavonte David, among them — players who could be in the Hall of Fame.
— Rick Stroud (@NFLSTROUD) March 13, 2024
Licht also acquired a third-round pick to supplement his roster with some youth come draft day by trading cornerback Carlton Davis (who had a hefty cap number in the last year of his contract) to the Detroit Lions. That was another shrewd move, in my view. Sportsbooks have made the Atlanta Falcons clear favorites to win the NFC South after they added Cousins and others, but I would still favor the Bucs after they maintained continuity.
If this were a game of old-fashioned “Battleship,” the Ravens’ ship would be, at minimum, listing starboard and perhaps on the verge of tipping over. Given how many pending free agents Baltimore had, this was to be expected, as I wrote last week.
GO DEEPER
Which NFL teams have the most to lose in free agency? Why the Ravens and others are at risk
The Ravens kept Justin Madubuike and added Derrick Henry, but they have already lost Patrick Queen, John Simpson, Gus Edwards, Geno Stone and Ronald Darby, with Jadeveon Clowney, Odell Beckham Jr. and Kevin Zeitler still on the market. Add in the decision to move on from starting right tackle Morgan Moses (let’s term this “friendly fire”), and they have taken their share of hits.
Rebuilding this roster will challenge GM Eric DeCosta and his staff to the highest degree. They have always been intentional about having a plan when something happens, so I don’t doubt their answer will be evident. I just worry this inordinate amount of change will lead to a natural adjustment period, which could take time. Nobody wants to turn a retool into a rebuild. Time will tell how much change one roster can absorb.
GO DEEPER
Ravens free-agency tracker: Ronnie Stanley’s contract revised, OBJ released
The Giants added proven but still ascending players on the offensive line in former Green Bay Packers guard Jon Runyan Jr. and former Las Vegas Raiders guard/tackle Jermaine Eluemunor. Being able to add two starting offensive linemen who have clear bodies of work is rare. These were two of the top five linemen on our free-agent board. Eluemunor was very good at right tackle for the Raiders in 2023 but can also play guard. That flexibility is valuable, given Evan Neal’s issues at right tackle. Runyan has top-notch initial quickness and the ability to engage his lower body on contact, which you seldom see any more in our world of spread offenses.
Oh yeah: Adding Brian Burns — who was my top-ranked player before he was franchise-tagged and the closest thing to Micah Parsons I’ve seen on tape recently — for second- and fifth-round picks is like adding a first-round talent on draft day. Any team would make that trade. The Giants struck in an opportune way.
GO DEEPER
What Giants’ bold trade for Brian Burns tells us about their future, Joe Schoen
Yes, they lost Saquon Barkley and Xavier McKinney, two of my favorite players in this class, but it’s hard to justify paying major money at running back and safety on a team that isn’t close to contention. Improving the offensive line and landing Burns will help them tremendously.
Favorite signing
Fantasy owners, take note. I loved the Los Angeles Chargers adding Edwards from the Ravens. I had thought all along that Barkley would be a culture upgrade for new coach Jim Harbaugh and his vision for the Chargers’ new offense. But as Barkley’s contract numbers crept higher, Edwards became more attractive.
He brings a full toolbox and good production with just a bit less dynamic athleticism. The Ravens’ running-back-by-committee kept Edwards’ numbers down, but he is a better player than that. He will be a 235-pound bellcow for a Chargers team looking to add toughness and physicality to fit its new identity.
Most puzzling signing
I was not surprised with how many expensive veteran safeties were released before free agency. I am shocked that teams are still adding veteran safeties who have marginal athletic ability. The Chicago Bears’ signing of Kevin Byard was a great example. The Philadelphia Eagles bet on Byard last season at the trade deadline, acquiring him from the Tennessee Titans. Not only did it not work out, but it went very badly.
In a passing league, it’s very hard to hide players who struggle in space, whether covering or tackling. There is no longer a “box safety” position. Byard was a great player a few years ago, but he’s clearly lost a step. Bears fans have to hope it turns out differently as he joins his third team in six months.
Deepest positions remaining
Rarely is it possible at all to find quality edge pass rushers or offensive perimeter speed on the open market. This year, there are options on the market for both, even after the free-agent tree has been picked of its low-hanging fruit. Clowney and Van Noy — who each signed after camps opened last fall — and Chase Young and Bud Dupree can all still contribute to teams looking for upgrades rushing the passer. Teams probably won’t have to pay retail prices for them, either.
GO DEEPER
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The same can be said at wide receiver. Vastly underrated Lions wideout Josh Reynolds can still provide an impact as a solid WR2 or WR3. Beckham, whom everyone loves to hate, is still very explosive and can change games. I realize this year’s draft is loaded with good young wideout prospects, which might be affecting the market, but these guys are proven commodities who would be great gets, at the right price.
The value stage is here
There is typically a pause in free agency after the initial bonanza of big-money signings and news conferences before the market settles into the “finding value” stage. From what I see, the market has already reached that stage. I see players willing to take less-than-premium deals to avoid being left without a chair when the music stops.
Guys like Gaines (back to the Bucs for one year, $3.5 million), Zack Baun (to the Eagles for one year, $3.5 million), Nick Harris (to the Seattle Seahawks for one year, $2.51 million) and Saahdiq Charles (to the Titans for one year, $2.5 million) might normally have hung on the market for weeks or months after their markets didn’t materialize. Instead, they signed quickly, and teams could find some value in those deals.
I credit agents for doing their homework — most likely at the combine in Indianapolis, during meetings with teams — and team-builders for identifying down-the-line guys who fit them. These value deals are a great way to build depth and have contributors who are ready when injuries strike.
Are teams getting wiser?
With the $30 million rise in the salary cap, teams are spending freely, but I think — this year more so than other years — teams are spending more wisely, too. Normally at this stage, I would have questions about several signings where the plan appears hard to justify. I have very few of those question marks through four days of the free-agent shopping season.
My objective in free agency was always to fill needs and check as many boxes as I could, within my cap restraints, before the draft. This allows you to draft without as much concern about needs, taking the best players available more often than not, rather than reaching for worse players in the early rounds. This has been a tried and true philosophy for years, and I think teams are following it, using value signings to fill holes and add flexibility.
(Photos of, from left, Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, Brian Burns and Kevin Byard: Adam Bettcher, Grant Halverson, Mitchell Leff / Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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