Would NFL ever hold draft before free agency?

The NBA draft happened last night. Every year, it happens before NBA free agency.

In some years, the question arises as to whether the NFL would ever reconfigure its calendar to hold the draft before free agency.

Actually, the NFL has already done it. In 2011, during the lockout, the draft happened before free agency. That year, free agency was a slapdash affair promptly after the lockout was resolved in late July/early August.

There would be pros and cons to conducting the draft first. Teams could use the draft to address needs preemptively. Success, or not, would give final negotiations with impending free agents much more clarity — one way or the other. Players who now sign with a team before potentially being supplanted by the draft (it happens seemingly every year to one or more veteran quarterbacks) would know where they stand on the way in.

The challenge becomes timing. Would the draft happen in March? When would the Combine occur? Would the Pro Day workouts be canceled? Truncated? And when would free agency commence?

The players rightfully would want to get free agency going as soon as possible, because the sooner they sign the sooner they get money, for the most part. For that reason alone, the NFL Players Association likely would push back against delaying free agency from its current starting point.

Then there’s the fact that the league usually engages in change when forced to do so, such as the transformation of the draft into a wildly-popular, year-to-year road show. That wasn’t some bright idea conjured up in a 345 brainstorming session. It sprang from the unavailability of the draft’s long-term home in Manhattan.

So, while it’s fun to talk about draft then free agency in the slow times, it will likely happen again only if there’s another offseason lockout that wipes out free agency but not the draft.

That said, it could be easy to get behind a general timeline that went draft first and then veteran free agency and then undrafted free agency. For the players not among those taken in the seven rounds of the draft, they would have much more knowledge and understanding of their next step than they currently do.

But this benefit to the hundreds of players who find themselves in the annual post-draft frenzy wouldn’t nearly be enough to get the NFL to rearrange its two biggest offseason tentpoles. Especially since the current late-April draft puts every NFL city in play to host it, eventually. Move it to the middle of March, and it would still be too cold for an outdoor event in plenty of places (like next year’s host, Detroit) that could pull it off six weeks later.

And, yes, factors like that have taken on much greater importance than the potential benefits to teams and players of flipping the timing of free agency and the draft.

Would NFL ever hold draft before free agency? originally appeared on Pro Football Talk