10 Brutal Times NFL Teams Did Their Players Dirty in Free Agency
Free agency is supposed to be the great equalizer in the NFL. It gives players the right to enter the market and seek out other NFL teams.
They put in the production and outperform contracts year after year. And then, finally, get paid what they’re actually worth.
Only… it doesn’t always work that way.
Because in a league where the franchise tag exists specifically to trap elite players… where rolling guarantees are the norm and fully guaranteed money is a fight to even get on the table… getting to free agency healthy, happy, and at market value is genuinely hard.
And sometimes a team doesn’t just make it hard. They make it personal, and sometimes it gets ugly.
Here are 10 times a team completely screwed a player over in free agency.
Which NFL players were badly screwed by a team in free agency?
Steve Smith Sr., WR, Carolina Panthers (2014)
Thirteen years—that’s how long Steve Smith spent building the Carolina Panthers franchise into something worth watching. Every record in their books had his name on it… 12,197 receiving yards, 836 catches, 67 touchdowns.
The man was the Carolina Panthers.
And on March 13, 2014, they called him and told him he was done—a move driven by GM Dave Gettleman’s desire to change the team culture and a belief that Smith had lost his top-end speed.
Sure, Smith was 34 years old… and salary cap casualties are not uncommon in the NFL, but he was a legend in Charlotte.
Shortly thereafter, he signed with Baltimore for three years and $11.5 million. He promised Carolina there would be “blood and guts everywhere” when he came back. And in Week 4 of the 2014 season, he delivered. 139 yards. Two touchdowns. A 38-to-10 Ravens rout of the same franchise that had discarded him.
That scoreboard said everything words couldn’t.
To be clear about what the Panthers did here… this wasn’t a situation where Smith was in decline. He caught 64 passes for 745 yards in 2013 at age 34. He was still producing—even on a terrible NFL team.
And it was the way that Gettleman went about it that made it all the more disrespectful
You don’t cut the all-time franchise leader for cap flexibility and expect him to take it quietly. Steve Smith made absolutely sure of that.
Bo Jackson, RB, Tampa Bay Buccaneers (1986)
What the Tampa Bay Buccaneers did to Bo Jackson was something different than just regular, old-fashioned market manipulation… They didn’t game the system. They lied to a 23-year-old kid and burned his college baseball eligibility to the ground on purpose.
A month before the 1986 NFL Draft, Buccaneers owner Hugh Culverhouse, an Alabama alum, by the way, arranged for a private jet to fly Jackson to Tampa for a physical and a facility visit.
At the time, Jackson was in the middle of his senior baseball season at Auburn and had the good sense to ask about eligibility. He was told explicitly that the trip had been cleared by the NCAA and the SEC.
It had not been cleared by anyone.
The SEC had a rule that barred athletes from being professionals in one sport while still amateurs in another. The moment Jackson took that jet and those benefits from an NFL franchise, his college baseball eligibility was gone. Just like that. Senior season over.
Jackson has said for decades that he believes it was deliberate.
And the consensus is that Culverhouse saw a generational athlete with a legitimate path to a two-sport career and decided the only way to force him into football was to take the other option off the table. His baseball coach at Auburn confirmed that nobody from either camp mentioned the trip to him beforehand. Had he known about the SEC rule, he said, he would have told Jackson immediately.
Needless to say, Bo was furious and told the Buccaneers not to bother drafting him because he would not suit up…
Of course, Tampa Bay drafted him anyway, first overall, no less.
Jackson proceeded to turn down a five-year, $7.6 million contract, the richest rookie deal in league history at the time. He then signed with the Kansas City Royals for $1.07 million over three years. He said in a recent interview that he played baseball for one reason: because he wasn’t going to Tampa.
The Raiders drafted him in the seventh round the following year and told him he could play both sports. And the rest is history! He became the most famous two-sport athlete in American history and one of the most iconic figures the sports world has ever seen. Plus, he helps out those in need, too.
Le'Veon Bell, RB, Pittsburgh Steelers (2017-2018)
The Steelers told Le’Veon Bell straight to his face that they would get his contract done.
The day after a divisional playoff loss to Jacksonville, Bell was pulled into an office. Kevin Colbert and Mike Tomlin told him they’d tag him for 2018, but that this time, they’d get the long-term extension figured out.
Bell later said that the conversation was the whole reason he agreed to take another tag without a fight… As we all know now, they did not get the long-term extension figured out.
Instead, they came back with five years, $70 million, but only $20.5 million guaranteed in Year 1, with everything else riding on rolling guarantees… For a running back who’d absorbed 321 carries in a single season and was functionally their most important offensive player, that is crazy.
Pittsburgh basically said: we’ll use your body until it breaks and hand you as little security as we can get away with.
Bell sat out the entire 2018 season. Left $14.5 million on the table. Cost himself a year of prime production for this NFL team.
He signed with the Jets for four years and $52.5 million the following spring. Did the holdout backfire eventually? Sure.
But what Pittsburgh asked him to absorb on the field for what they put on the table in return was never close to fair. And everyone in that building knew it.
Trent Williams, OT, Washington Redskins (2019)
In 2013, Trent Williams noticed a growth on his head. He told the Redskins’ medical staff about it. They told him it was a cyst… Something minor and nothing to worry about.
He kept complaining, and his NFL team told him the same thing over and over again… reportedly for six years.
In the 2019 offseason, Washington finally sent him to a specialist and found out he had a rare, aggressive soft-tissue cancer attached to his skull. The surgery to remove it required 350 stitches and 75 staples. The incision was the diameter of a softball. By the time doctors got to it, they told Williams they had caught it within weeks of it metastasizing to his brain.
Trust was broken, and Williams held out the entire 2019 season—and the team used a loophole to avoid paying him…
Because he failed a physical due to discomfort with his helmet from the surgery and was placed on the non-football injury list, they were able to withhold payment for the rest of the season… and refused to trade him for months on end.
Finally, he was mercifully traded to San Francisco in 2020, where he reclaimed his status as one of the best linemen in the game.
So, not a clean “free agency” screw over here, but such dirty business that it simply had to be included.
Reggie White, DE, Philadelphia Eagles (1993)
Before the modern franchise tag, NFL teams used a franchise player designation that functioned the same way—a unilateral veto on a player’s freedom—and the Eagles used it to hold Reggie White in place for years.
One of the greatest defensive players in history, sitting at below-market value because the league had designed a system specifically to limit what players could earn.
White helped lead the legal fight that cracked the whole thing open. His involvement was central to the 1993 settlement that finally brought real free agency to the NFL.
And when the market finally opened? Philadelphia showed up with an offer that didn’t match what he was worth.
It wasn’t long until the Packers came calling, and White signed a four-year, $17 million contract in Green Bay. He won a Super Bowl. He became one of the five greatest players who ever lived.
Philadelphia got nothing.
The Eagles spent years blocking the man’s freedom, treated the moment his leverage arrived like a formality, and watched him walk to a championship without them. It set the template for every franchise tag dispute that followed.
Kirk Cousins, QB, Washington Redskins (2016-2017)
Washington franchise-tagged Kirk Cousins not once, but twice.
The first year, he made $19.9 million. The second year, $23.9 million. He became the first quarterback in NFL history to play consecutive seasons under the franchise tag. Two years of holding a franchise hostage with his own production while Washington kept pretending their offers were serious.
Their best long-term offer, by multiple accounts, would have only guaranteed him one more year beyond what the transition tag would have paid automatically. That’s not a contract. That’s just arithmetic.
He rescued them from the RGIII disaster and led Washington back to relevant football. And the team came back with half measures every time.
Fortunately for Cousins, he was able to escape the grasp of Washington. He walked to Minnesota in 2018 and signed the first fully guaranteed quarterback contract in NFL history. Three years, $84 million, every penny of it guaranteed.
Not too shabby!
Earl Thomas, S, Seattle Seahawks (2018)
Earl Thomas told the Seahawks exactly what he wanted… an extension. Or a trade. Something that acknowledged the way he played football, which was, by any reasonable measure, at an All-Pro level for eight straight seasons. He published a letter during his 2018 holdout that put it plainly: if you’re risking your body to deliver all of this value, you deserve some assurance that the organization will take care of you if you get hurt.
Seattle would not budge. They also reportedly had a chance to trade him to Dallas for a second-round pick and passed because they didn’t want to help the Cowboys before the two NFL teams played in Week 3.
Thomas came back from the holdout because missing weekly game checks of $500,000 wasn’t sustainable. In Week 4 against Arizona, he broke his leg on the same limb he’d fractured two years earlier.
As the cart took him off the field, he gave the Seahawks sideline the middle finger.
It was not a complicated message.
He went to Baltimore for four years and $55 million the following spring—a good deal, but a fraction of what he would’ve gotten had he not gotten hurt.
Steve McNair, QB, Tennessee Titans (2006)
On April 3rd, 2006, Steve McNair showed up at the Tennessee Titans’ facility for offseason workouts.
A team trainer told him to leave.
Not in a meeting. Not with a discussion about the future. McNair… the franchise’s all-time winningest quarterback, their co-MVP from 2003, the man who had dragged that organization to a Super Bowl appearance and given them the best decade of football in franchise history—was told to leave the building because Tennessee didn’t want to be liable for his $23.46 million cap number if he got hurt on their property.
That’s right. They kept asking him to restructure his deal every year to create cap room, inflating his cap figure each time. And when the bill finally came due, they literally locked their franchise quarterback out of the building.
McNair filed and won a grievance, as an arbitrator ruled that a player under contract has a right to work out at his team’s facility. The fact that it had to go to arbitration at all says everything about the way the Titans ran their organization at that time.
In any case, he was eventually traded to Baltimore, where he led the Ravens to a 13-and-3 record in 2006. Made the Pro Bowl at 33 years old.
Drew Brees, QB, San Diego Chargers (2006)
Our younger fans may not remember this, but Drew Brees suffered one of the most devastating shoulder injuries in NFL history in the final game of the 2005 season.
A 360-degree labrum tear with a deep partial rotator cuff tear.
Brees later said he wasn’t sure he’d ever put on a football uniform again.
So, it wasn’t a huge shock when San Diego’s offer that offseason came in rather low… but it still felt wrong… like dirty business!
It was a four-year, $50 million contract… but with only a couple of million in Year 1 guaranteed money—which was wild.
Realistically, it was backup quarterback money for an NFL team dressed up in big headline numbers and buried in the fine print.
But to be fair, the skepticism about Brees’ prospects of playing good football again was not isolated in San Diego… Only two other teams even called. Miami had its doctors examine the shoulder for hours, and ran the other direction. New Orleans and Sean Payton, on the other hand, sat with Brees for two hours watching film, talking schemes, never once mentioning the injury.
Brees signed six years and $60 million contract with the Saints, where he went on to win a Super Bowl and became one of the NFL’s most decorated passers, while the Chargers continued to toil away in mediocrity.
Kirk Cousins, QB, Atlanta Falcons (2024)
Believe it or not, Kirk Cousins has actually been done dirty twice!
Atlanta handed Kirk Cousins a four-year, $180 million contract in March 2024. $100 million fully guaranteed. The largest commitment in franchise history… So it is hard to feel that bad for him…
But six weeks later, they used the eighth overall pick in the draft on Michael Penix Jr.
Read that again.
The Falcons gave a quarterback $100 million in guaranteed money and then, before he threw a single pass in the regular season, told the world they already had his replacement on the way. The optics alone were staggering. The actual football logic was somehow worse.
By midseason, the Falcons benched Cousins for Penix — a rookie who wasn’t ready and a situation nobody in that building had thought through properly.
Granted, this NFL team screwed itself over in the process, but needless to say, Cousins was not thrilled either.
10 Brutal Times NFL Teams Did Their Players Dirty in Free Agency
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