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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
In prehistoric northern Europe, peatlands — areas of waterlogged soil rich with decaying plant matter — were considered spiritual sites. Since then, swords, jewelry and even human bodies have been found fossilized in their sludgy depths. More recently, however, many of these bogs have been depleted by overharvesting, neglect and development. But as awareness of their important role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere grows, more wetlands are being restored, while also serving as unlikely creative inspiration. Here’s how bogs are showing up in the culture.
Fashion
At fall 2026 Paris Fashion Week, several houses — including Louis Vuitton (above left) and Hermès — staged shows amid mossy sets featuring spongy green structures and mounds of vegetation. And the Danish fashion brand Solitude Studios is distressing its eerie, grungy looks (above right) by submerging them in a local peat bog.
Contemporary Art
For her exhibition at California’s San José Museum of Art, on view through October, the Chalon Nation artist Christine Howard Sandoval is presenting sculptures, drawings and plant-dyed works (above) exploring how the state’s wetlands were once sites of Indigenous resistance and community. This month, at Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley, the conceptual artist Anicka Yi will unveil an outdoor installation featuring six-foot-tall transparent columns holding algae-rich ecosystems cultivated from nearby pond water and soil.
Architecture and Design
The Bog Bothy (above), a mobile design project by the Dublin-based architecture practice 12th Field in collaboration with the Irish Architecture Foundation, was inspired by the makeshift huts once used by peat cutters who harvested the material for fuel. After debuting in the Irish Midlands last year, it’ll tour the region again this summer. In Edinburgh, the designer Oisín Gallagher is making doorstops from subfossilized bog-oak scraps carbon-dated to 3300 B.C.
Fine Dining
At La Grenouillère on France’s north coast, the chef Alexandre Gauthier reflects the restaurant’s reedy, frog-filled river valley landscape with dishes like a “marsh bubble” of herbs encased in hardened sugar. This spring, Aponiente — the chef Ángel León’s restaurant inside a 19th-century tidal mill on Spain’s Bay of Cádiz — added an outdoor dining area on a pier above the neighboring marshland, serving local sea grasses and salt marsh flowers alongside seafood (above) from the estuary.
Literature
The Irish British writer Maggie O’Farrell’s forthcoming novel, “Land,” about an Irish cartographer and his son surveying the island in 1865 after the Great Famine, depicts haunting encounters with the verdant landscape, including its plentiful oozing bogs.
SELLING OPPORTUNITY: The Story of Mary Kay, by Mary Lisa Gavenas
Mary Kay, the cosmetics company whose multilevel marketing included sales parties and whose biggest earners were awarded pink Cadillacs, was really in the business of selling second chances. Or, at least, that’s what Mary Lisa Gavenas argues in “Selling Opportunity,” a dual biography of the brand and the woman behind it.
Mary Kathlyn Wagner, who would become Mary Kay Ash, “the most famous saleswoman in the world” and “maybe the most famous ever,” in Gavenas’s extravagant words, was born in 1918 to a poor family and raised mostly in Houston. Although a good student, she eloped at 16 with a slightly older boy. The young couple had two babies in quick succession.
Mary Kay’s creation was a combination of timing and good luck. Door-to-door sales was a thriving industry — but, traditionally, a man’s world: Lugging heavy samples was not considered feminine, and entering the homes of strangers, unsafe. But things began to change during the Great Depression, Gavenas suggests, thanks to a convergence of factors — financial pressures and the rise of the aspirational prosperity gospel espoused by Dale Carnegie’s self-help manuals.
At the same time, female-run beauty lines like Annie Turnbo Malone’s Poro and Madam C.J. Walker’s were finding great success in Black communities. And, coincidentally or otherwise, the California Perfume Company changed its name to Avon Products in 1939.
Ash began by selling books door to door, moving on to Stanley Home Products in the 1940s. She was talented, but direct sales was a rough gig. Every party to show off wares was supposed to beget two more bookings; these led to sales that resulted in new recruits. But there was no real security or stability: no salary, no medical benefits, no vacations. “Stop selling and you would end up right back where you started. Or worse,” the author writes.
Gavenas, a onetime beauty editor who wrote “Color Stories,” takes her time unspooling Mary Kay’s tale, with a great deal of evident research. We learn about direct sales, women’s rights and Texas history.
But, be warned: Readers must really enjoy both this woman and this world to take pleasure in “Selling Opportunity.” Mary Kay the person keeps marrying, getting divorced or widowed and working her way through various sales jobs (it’s hard to keep track of the myriad companies and last names). Gavenas seems to leave no detail out. Thus, the 1963 founding of the eponymous beauty company doesn’t come until almost 200 pages in.
Beauty by Mary Kay included a Cleansing Cream, a Magic Masque and a Nite Cream (which containined ammoniated mercury, later banned by the F.D.A.). The full line of products — which was how Mary Kay strongly encouraged customers to buy them — ran to a steep $175 in today’s money. (To fail to acquire the whole set, Ash said, was “like giving you my recipe for chocolate cake but leaving out an important ingredient.”)
Potential clients attended gatherings at acquaintances’ homes — no undignified doorbell-ringing here — where they received a mini facial, then an application of cosmetics like foundation, lip color and cream rouge — and a wig. The company made $198,514 in sales its first year.
Although Ash may have seemed a pioneer, in many ways Mary Kay was a traditionalist company, whose philosophy was “God first, family second, career third.” Saleswomen, official literature dictated, were working to provide themselves with treats rather than necessities so as not to threaten their breadwinner husbands.
And yet, they were also encouraged to sell sell sell. Golden Goblet pendants were awarded for major orders. After the company started using custom pink Peterbilt trucks for shipping, it began commissioning those Cadillacs for top consultants. (Mary Kay preferred gifts to cash bonuses, lest women save the money to spend on practical things rather than the licensed frivolities.) The Cadillacs, always driven on company leases, would become industry legend and part of American pop culture lore. “Never to be run-down, repainted or resold, the cars would double as shining pink advertisements for her selling opportunity,” Gavenas writes.
The woman herself was iconic, too. While Ash was a product of the Depression, she was also undeniably over-the-top. She wore white suits with leopard trim, lived in a custom Frank L. Meier house and brought her poodle to the office.
Mary Kay went public in 1968, making her the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange. By the 1990s, the Mary Kay headquarters near Dallas was almost 600,000 square feet. They commissioned a hagiographic company biopic; there was a Mary Kay consultant Barbie; they were making $1 billion in wholesale. When she died, in 2001, Ash was worth $98 million.
And yet, Gavenas cites that at the company’s height, in 1992, sales reps made on average just $2,400 per year.
Instead of so much time in the pink fantasia of Mary Kay, it would have been nice for a few detours showing how infrequently the opportunities the company sold were truly realized.
SELLING OPPORTUNITY: The Story of Mary Kay | By Mary Lisa Gavenas | Viking | 435 pp. | $35
We often think of the past as if it were another world — and in some ways, it is. The politics, religion and social customs of other eras can be vastly different from our own. But one thing historians and historical fiction writers alike often notice is the constancy of human emotion. The righteous anger of a customer complaining about a Mesopotamian copper merchant in 1750 B.C. feels familiar. Tributes to beloved household pets from ancient Romans and Egyptians make us smile. And we are captivated by stories of love, betrayal and sacrifice from Homer to Shakespeare and beyond.
In literature, letters, tablets and even on coins, we find overwhelming evidence that people in the past felt the same emotions we do. Love, hate, fear, grief, joy: These feelings were as much a part of their lives as they are of our own. And they resonate especially acutely in the bond between mother and child. Here are eight historical novels that explore the meaning of motherhood across the centuries.
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