The NFL free agency period is one of the craziest few days of football during the calendar year, and nobody even takes a snap. The NFL draft is calm, cool, and collected. There is order and theatre involved. Free agency, on the other hand, is very much like its origins, a chaotic mess.
It’s taken care of in the shadows without television coverage, even though the money exchanged can net figures no longer possible in the draft process. But how did we get here? What is the history of free agency, and how has it led us to this day?
History of NFL Free Agency
Free agency as we know it today is not very old. The addition of the legal tampering period began in 2013 but wasn’t fully fleshed out until 2016, meaning we’ve only lived in this world of free agency since then.
However, we took a winding road to get here, and the hurdles players have had to jump through over time to fight for fair open-market compensation are absolutely absurd by today’s labor standards.
The Reserve Clause (1921-1948)
The Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and World War II. What a bonkers 30-year period. And during that period, the NFL was making sure that they didn’t have to lose a player to another football team if they didn’t want to.
The “reserve clause” was first implemented in professional baseball in 1879, and the NFL began its own version when its first constitution was written in 1921. This allowed teams to reserve the rights to their players in perpetuity, never allowing them to test the open market and therein never allowing them to realize their true monetary value to the sport.
Yet, even though the reserve clause was abandoned in 1948, it would be years before a player actually moved teams.
The One-Year Option (1948-1962)
Much like a mix between the modern-day fifth-year option for first-round picks and the franchise tag, from 1948-1962, the NFL implemented the one-year option. The NFL abandoned the reserve clause for this new form of free agency when its second constitution was ratified in 1948.
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However, no player actually left their team after the one-year option until 1962, when R.C. Owens played out the final year of his contract before signing with the Baltimore Colts in 1962. But the poor organization in San Francisco couldn’t handle the loss of Owens without throwing a fit, so the rules were redesigned for the following season.
The Rozelle Rule (1963-1976)
49ers owner Vic Morabito proposed the inclusion of the “Rozelle Rule” on top of the one-year option. Effectively, players needed to accept the one-year option as part of their contract and at just 90% of the compensation rate of the expiring contract.
The rule allowed Pete Rozelle to award compensation from the team signing the free agent to the team losing the free agent if the teams had not discussed compensation prior to the signing. In essence, there was no true “free” agent, because the receiving team had to pay the other team in the form of picks, money, or draft picks.
But there was a problem that was somehow ignored for 13 years. The rule was illegal. It violated the league’s antitrust laws, and the NFL was forced to abandon it in 1976.
The two cases that changed the NFL’s course were Kapp vs. NFL and Mackey vs. NFL. The Mackey case is more recognizable, but both judges concluded that because the current system was unreasonable, it was therefore illegal.
The Right of First Refusal (1977-1988)
The beginning of restricted free agency, kind of. The change to the Mackey Rule allowed teams to match a contract offer made by other NFL teams. But unlike the Rozelle Rule, there was a scale based on a player’s experience and salary.
Plan B Free Agency (1989-1992)
Before the league had its current 53-man rosters, it was once 47. With the new free agency plan, teams could “protect” 37 of the 47 players on the roster.
This effectively kept the team’s best players on the roster. In the four seasons the plan existed, only Wilber Marshall changed teams as a restricted player.
NFL Free Agency (1993-Present)
Reggie White is one of the most influential players ever to grace a football field. If he’s not considered the best pass rusher of all time, he’s in the top three. But White also changed free agency, which has helped make the NFL calendar more of a 12-month affair.
At first, any veteran with five years of experience became an unrestricted free agent. Obviously, now, five years of potential control only comes with first-round draft picks.
This marked the beginning of the franchise tag, exclusive rights free agency, and the continuation of the right of first refusal for undrafted players.
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NFL owners, being the… cost-focused… billionaires they are, were worried that free agency would bankrupt them. In Jeff Benedict’s book The Dynasty, he wrote, “During the litigation, an NFL lawyer told the court that free agency ‘would be the destruction of the National Football League as we know it today.'”
Teams wanted as much control as possible, and they felt they were being stripped of that. They felt the top salaries would rise to unsustainable levels. So the owners implemented the salary cap in 1994, protecting their precious money.
In 2013, the league introduced the “legal” tampering period, a period of time before the start of the league year when teams could communicate with unrestricted free agents. Because they couldn’t stop teams from illegally communicating with agents and players, they gave up and allowed players still technically under contract to communicate with teams through their agents.