Culture
The 8 NFL free-agent signings with the best chance to outproduce their contracts
The first wave of NFL free agency is winding down, and there are now plenty of deals to assess.
In the team free agency rankings we released ahead of the negotiation window earlier this month, we dove into the data from the previous four years, 2021 through 2024. We logged cash spent on each free agent during that span. We also logged the value produced — using Football Reference’s Approximate Value metric — by each player while he was on his free-agent contract. By comparing these two figures, we determined how much value each free agent produced per $1 million in cash spent, or AV per million. And, in turn, we ranked teams at large by how much value they were producing per $1 million cash spent on the free agent market.
Now we can use that data to try and project the best value deals from the early returns in this 2025 free agent class. From 2021 to 2024, the league average in AV per million was .713. That is the benchmark we will use in our projections. Any player who produces more than .713 AV per million can be classified as an above-average return on investment. For reference, quarterback Russell Wilson had the highest AV per million of any free agent signed in the 2024 class. He finished with 9 AV in 11 starts for Pittsburgh. The Steelers paid Wilson just $1.21 million in cash.
What we are looking for are low-cost signings that have the chance to outperform their bargain deals.
Here are our eight best potential value deals of the first wave of free agency.
(All contract figures courtesy of Over the Cap.)
Levi Onwuzurike, IDL, Detroit Lions
2025 cash: $4 million
Interior defensive linemen got paid in this free-agent cycle. Milton Williams signed with the New England Patriots for $26 million in average per year (APY). Osa Odighizuwa returned to the Dallas Cowboys on a contract worth $20 million in APY. Javon Kinlaw got $15 million in APY from the Washington Commanders, while Tershawn Wharton got just over $15 million in APY from the Carolina Panthers. Onwuzurike had more pressures (47) and a higher pass rush win percentage (11.9) than both Wharton and Kinlaw in 2024, according to Pro Football Focus. He returned to the Lions on a far cheaper deal.
Onwuzurike only finished the season with 1 1/2 sacks, and perhaps that lack of box score production affected his market. But the upside here feels tremendous if Onwuzurike can maintain his level of pressure. An AV per million above 2.0 seems well in reach. Only 34 free agents from the 2024 class hit that number in 2024.
Joshua Uche, edge, Philadelphia Eagles
2025 cash: $1.92 million
The Eagles were the clear winners of free agency in 2024. It is no coincidence they went on to win the Super Bowl. Philadelphia received above-average AV per million returns on several free agents, including linebacker Zack Baun (4.0), running back Saquon Barkley (1.2) and guard Mekhi Becton (1.5). Baun was in the top 10 in AV per million after transitioning to off-ball linebacker and having a breakout All-Pro season.
If the Eagles are going to hit big on a 2025 free agent value signing like they did with Baun last year, Uche is a good bet. He is cheap. He had an 11 1/2-sack season with the Patriots in 2022. He will be playing alongside one of the best defensive tackles in football in Jalen Carter. And we saw in 2024 what kind of impact Carter had on his teammates, including Williams and edge rusher Josh Sweat, both of whom left in free agency. The big question with Uche is whether he can earn playing time in a deep edge rusher room in Philly. Nolan Smith Jr., Bryce Huff and Jalyx Hunt all return. The Eagles also signed Azeez Ojulari to a one-year deal in free agency.
Nick Westbrook-Ikhine, WR, Miami Dolphins
2025 cash: $3.2 million
One big theme in our AV-per-million player rankings: Low-cost receivers with a pathway to playing time tend to produce substantial returns on investment. The Washington Commanders had two receivers in our 2024 top 10: Olamide Zaccheaus (4.64 in AV per million) and Noah Brown (4.13). Zaccheaus made $1.29 million in cash and caught 45 passes for 506 yards and three touchdowns. Brown made $1.21 million in cash and caught 35 passes for 453 yards and one touchdown.
Westbrook-Ikhine fits the profile in this year’s class. He has good size at 6-foot-2, 211 pounds and is a legitimate weapon in the red zone. His skill set is a logical complement to Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle. Westbrook-Ikhine had nine touchdowns in 2024, tied for eighth among receivers. Six of those came in the red zone, also tied for eighth.
Richie Grant, S, San Francisco 49ers
2025 cash: $1.5 million
Grant, a former second-round pick to the Atlanta Falcons in 2021, started 32 games over the 2022 and 2023 seasons. But he lost his starting job when coach Raheem Morris and his staff took over in 2024. He should have a chance to compete for a starting job with the 49ers, who lost Talanoa Hufanga in free agency. Grant will have to beat out 2023 third-round pick Ji’Ayir Brown and Jason Pinnock, who San Francisco signed to a one-year, $2.2 million deal in free agency.
If Grant wins the job and plays starting snaps, there is a clear avenue toward a high AV per million. The 49ers have a history of finding value on cheap safety contracts. In 2022, they paid $1.12 million in cash for veteran Tashaun Gipson Sr., who started all 17 games. Gipson’s 6.25 AV per million that season ranks second for any free agent during the 2021-24 window.
If Richie Grant becomes a starter for the 49ers, he could be a bargain for his $1.5 salary in 2025. (Brett Davis / Imagn Images)
Ifeatu Melifonwu, S, Miami Dolphins
2025 cash: $3 million
The Dolphins had to retool their safety room during this year’s free agency period. Jevon Holland signed a big deal with the New York Giants. Jordan Poyer, who turns 34 in April, is a free agent. The Dolphins, at least partially because of their tight cap situation, had to look for cheap answers at the position. They signed Ashtyn Davis to a one-year, $2.5 million deal and they signed Melifonwu to a slightly more expensive contract. Both of these deals have the potential for AV-per-million upside.
Melifonwu, a college cornerback who transitioned to safety in Detroit, has a higher ceiling. He has battled injuries and only played more than 10 games one time in his first four NFL seasons with the Lions. But when he played a full season in 2023, Melifonwu showed a ton of promise, including as a blitzer and in his ball production.
Najee Harris, RB, Los Angeles Chargers
2025 cash: $5.25 million
Harris is positioned to be a workhorse back for the Chargers, who cut Gus Edwards and have not yet re-signed J.K. Dobbins. Harris has not missed a game in his four NFL seasons. He has carried the ball at least 255 times and rushed for at least 1,000 rushing yards in all of those seasons. He has never finished a season with less than 6 AV. He has averaged 7.75 AV per season. This could end up being more of a base-hit signing.
If Harris can rediscover some of his rookie-year form, particularly as a pass catcher, this could become a more significant return on investment. In 2021, Harris caught 74 passes on 94 targets for 467 yards. His quarterback that season was Ben Roethlisberger. Harris produced a career-high 10 AV. The Steelers have been in QB purgatory since then, even if they got some viable production out of Wilson in 2024. Justin Herbert is quite willing to hit his check down if he has the running back to do it. Just ask Austin Ekeler.
This signing is reminiscent of the Devin Singletary deal with the Houston Texans in 2023. Singletary was entering his age-26 season and coming off his rookie deal that offseason. He was moderately productive over his first four seasons. He signed a one-year deal with the Texans and made $3.125 million in cash. That year, Singletary played all 17 games and produced 2.24 AV per million. Harris is entering his age-27 season. The cash figures are slightly elevated. But in terms of percentage of the cap, Singletary was at 1.4 percent. and Harris is at 1.9 percent.
Van Jefferson, WR, Tennessee Titans
2025 cash: $1.67 million
The Titans have some decisions to make before the start of the 2025 season, including who their starting quarterback will be. They have the No. 1 pick, which they could use on a quarterback. They could very well add another receiver in the draft. But as it stands, Jefferson has a chance to be the No. 2 option for whoever is throwing the football, behind Calvin Ridley.
This feels similar to the Zaccheaus and Brown deals, who were playing alongside No. 1 Terry McLaurin. The Commanders struck gold with quarterback Jayden Daniels. At the price, there is plenty of room for a strong return on Jefferson, who in 2021 caught 50 passes for 802 yards and six touchdowns with the Los Angeles Rams.
Cornelius Lucas, OT, Cleveland Browns
2025 cash: $3.25 million
Lucas has made a career out of being a trustworthy swing tackle. The 33-year-old has double-digit career starts on both the right and left side, but he has only started more than eight games in one season.
The Browns do not have a reliable plan for left tackle on the roster. Dawand Jones, a 2023 fourth-round pick, has landed on IR in each of his first two seasons. The team signed Teven Jenkins but he’s primarily been a guard. Jedrick Wills is a free agent. Not to mention that right tackle Jack Conklin turns 31 in August and has battled multiple serious knee injuries, most recently in 2023. If Lucas starts a bunch of games at tackle for the Browns this season, he will be high up in our AV per million rankings next March.
(Top photos of Levi Onwuzurike and Najee Harris: Jorge Lemus / NurPhoto via Getty Images and Candice Ward / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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