The Teams That Will Rule NFL Free Agency | The MMQB NFL Podcast

Is your team looking to make a splash? Conor Orr and Gary Gramling have you covered.

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In Part 1 of the two-part free agency epic, Conor and Gary run through which will be the biggest (or, at least most interesting) teams when free agency opens.

The Dolphins are the team with the most effective cap space, the most drastic change at head coach and the most glaring holes on the roster. The Bengals’ window is wide-open and, suddenly, they’re a draw coming off a run to the Super Bowl. The Steelers have cap room for the first time in a long time, but that won’t necessarily answer their questions at quarterback. And the Colts have cap room and seemingly little desire to run it back with Carson Wentz, but that doesn’t solve their question mark under center.

Plus, the Jets continue their rebuild, and which are the teams that might create cap room to make a splash this offseason?

Have a comment, critique or question for a future mailbag? Have a question for the show? Email themmqb@gmail.com or tweet at @GGramling_SI or @ConorOrr.

The following is an automatically generated transcript from The MMQB NFL Podcast. Listen to the full episode on podcast players everywhere or on SI.com.

Gary Gramling: We are in part one of our two-part NFL free agency extravaganza here. And this show is going to focus on the teams who will be making a splash, or potentially making a splash here—we don’t know for sure, but the teams, we are very interested in keeping an eye on. In the midweek show we will have a rundown of the free agents themselves. And sort of run through who we like, and we don’t like, etc., etc. But we are going to start this by focusing on the teams. We use overthecap.com to get a big picture view of who has cap space, who doesn’t. The cap is ... as you know, a bit of a myth. We are kind of inadvertently starting at the top here with the first team we’re going to cover, the Miami Dolphins who according to overthecap.com have the most effective cap-space at $58 million. Plus going into free agency here, they are a team that’s undergoing a very interesting metamorphosis down there in Miami.

Conor Orr: Yeah, and to be clear, it’s so funny when someone says, oh, you use Over the Cap? And it’s like, yeah—I have access to the league salary cap numbers, but they’re just never right and they’re never updated. Jason at Over the Cap does the Lord’s work, and actually puts in the effective cap space so we don’t have to sit there with calculators for half of our day. So God bless you, Jason; thank you. But yeah, Miami is really interesting to me because Mike McDaniels, their new head coach, is Kyle Shanahan’s run guru and has been forever. And is sort of the secret sauce behind that outside zone offense. I think that was a big reason why you saw the 49ers run out and get Anthony Lynn, who actually was a running back on that offense, to try and get some of that institutional knowledge back. But here’s what I'm looking for—and I’m curious of your take on this. When we saw Kyle go in San Francisco, they were super aggressive in free agency, but in weird places, right? Like they needed Kyle Juszczyk to make everything work. When we saw Matt LaFleur go to Green Bay, they wanted guys like Marcedes Lewis, and there’s all these very specific players that they need that are extremely important. Like if Marcedes Lewis got hurt, the Packers would have been S.O.L. And if Kyle Juszczyk got hurt in addition to George Kittle, the 49ers would have won like four games last year. And I think that there are these players that they desperately depend on to make the outside zone work. And I’m really interested to see now ... cause Nathaniel Hackett’s got a job somewhere, Mike McDaniels got a job somewhere ... like half the league is running this offense now, and the other half is still trying to figure out how to run it, without any of the guys to run it.

Gary Gramling: It’s like, you can go back six years and look at what happened to the Seattle defense. Getting those long cornerbacks who weren’t necessarily burners, but the longer guys were kind of the market inefficiency they had found with that Cover 3 style defense that they played. And then as we move through kind of the late 2010s, everyone kind of wanted those guys—not literally everyone, but most teams wanted those guys. Now that’s a little more broad because a cornerback is just sort of a purely reactionary position and being a big guy is helpful anyway. But it is really interesting because picking off the coaching tree, you want to do it, but at the same time it’s like, O.K., well now we have to get those kinds of players in here. And there are only so many of them, there are only so many Kyle Juszczyks, even the offensive lineman—they need those quick, nimble offensive lineman. The 49ers have kind of a loose metric analytic sort of approach to what they’re looking for as far as size in their offensive linemen and there's only so many of those guys out there. 

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