The most significant contract handed out to a WR during this free agency period was a four-year, $92 million pact the Tennessee Titans made with Calvin Ridley. The deal comes with $50 million guaranteed, a $10 million cap hit in 2024, and a potential out in two years. Ridley is coming off his first complete season since 2020 after sitting out most of 2021 to concentrate on his mental health, then serving a league-imposed suspension in 2022 for gambling. In 2019 and 2020, with the Atlanta Falcons, Ridley ranked inside the top 24 among WRs in PPR PPG, including an overall WR5 finish in 2020. In 2023, as a member of the Jacksonville Jaguars, he was the WR20, logging a 76-1016-8 stat line, ranking 11th in the league in receiving expected points (reEP). As Ridley attempts to regain his footing among the elite at his position, he will turn 30 this December, putting him dangerously close to the age cliff for an NFL WR.
A TITANIC AMOUNT OF SPENDING
The Titans, who had the fourth-most cap space heading into 2024 free agency, have spent somewhat loosely thus far. They have spent the third-most money this free agency period, trailing the Falcons, who inked Kirk Cousins to a massive deal, and the Panthers, who are scrambling to fit a roster around Bryce Young.
Many have been outwardly puzzled at the Titans’ shopping spree, seeing them as a team that needs a complete overhaul from the ground up. But for the Titans, the purpose of their spending seems more obvious: they want to see what they have in second-year QB Will Levis.
While two team-building strategies seem to dominate the NFL — building a roster and dropping in a QB on a rookie contract or finding an elite QB and churning the roster around him — the Titans are stuck somewhere in between. From their angle, I suppose, there is no reason to argue about it now; they are where they are, and they can’t change those circumstances easily (though it can be reasonably argued they could fire sale their assets and start from scratch).
If they want to exit 2024 with an evaluation of Levis, they may indeed be doing the right thing, finding an abundance of the best talent they can find wherever they can find it. Whether or not some of their specific moves make sense is another discussion; it is highly possible the team understands they are operating in suboptimal ways, but they still feel they owe it to themselves to give Levis some semblance of surrounding cast at any cost — a reconnaissance mission of sorts, where information is the only real goal.
If Levis fails miserably, the team may also try third-year man Malik Willis again; if that fails, they may be back toward the top of the 2025 NFL draft. But if Levis can fill the role, the team will have solved arguably their biggest dilemma.
Consider me skeptical.
WHO IS WILL LEVIS?
In April 2023, Stefan Lako dug deep into Levis and identified him as a prospect with significant bust potential. Stefan detailed several areas of concern in Levis’s profile but identified his production profile — or lack thereof — as a “reason we should approach Levis with caution.”
