What About 2011’s Free Agent Pool?

With all the talk of free agency and the draft, I hadn’t really stopped to consider the potential that next year’s free agency market could be really spectacular.

There figures to be an Olympic-sized pool of free agent talent after a new collective bargaining agreement is reached, whenever that is. I’ll endorse caution now, but we’ll see what the Glazers have in mind later to deal with that bumper crop.

If the new CBA is structured similarly to the current one, we’ll have the normal pool of players hit the market entering their fourth year. But we’ll also have the former restricted free agents who are only on RFA tender deals for 2010 also coming free. There were 212 players who were denied true unrestricted free agency under the uncapped rules. All of them who were tendered and signed by their own teams (which will be most of them) will come available in 2011 unless they get a long-term deal done. That’s a lot of quality meat for the taking (if I had a dime for every time I’ve heard that.)

The rest of the article is about how the Bucs are sticking with their mantra of building through the draft, so maybe they’ll ignore next year’s free agency as well. But maybe they’re brilliant and we won’t realize it until next year. Maybe it was all about 2011 all along, so they stockpiled some draft picks in the deepest draft in years, and then they’ll have a ton of cap space available next year when the free agency pool is unusually deep. And then they’ll have a GM and head coach with two full years of experience as they take on their most talented roster in a decade. Wouldn’t it be something if, after all this criticism being heaped on them for the last two years that the Buccaneers front office was right all along?