“Hi Darren! There’s one thing i don’t understand, would like to hear your opinion about it: Why is the start if free agency before the draft? I always feel like if you want to build a roster, you have much more chances to impact the FA than the draft. If there are several positions to add as starter, there is almost no way to control the draft so that the guys Monti likes are still available (if we put expensive trades up to the side). If the draft would be prior, it would be easy to see which prospect fall in your hands and control your destiny afterwards in FA in chasing specific positions which are left out in the draft with a dollar or two more. Hope you get what I mean, greetings from Germany!”
I do, indeed, get what you mean. It’s funny; free agency as we know it is a relatively different thing than the NFL had until about 1990, so at that time it didn’t matter. (And the draft, once upon a time, was in January right after the season.) But we are on to now, when free agency comes in mid-March as contracts expire with the new league year, and the draft remains in late April. The timing for free agency can’t change — unless they change the start of the league year and all the contracts. So it would be about moving the draft. Now that the Super Bowl has moved to February (and, eventually with 18 games whenever, is going to be even later), some teams would have no chance to be ready fully for the draft before free agency.
But there is also a practical reason players wouldn’t want it to change. Players already in the league want their FA to be before the draft because if it came after the draft, it would naturally tamp down the FA market — jobs would already be filled with younger players, and cutting down needs for teams like that would remove potential spots for guys looking for teams. That means less money.