I Am Standing By For News

It’s Monday morning and I’m ready for the start of NFL free agency. The window to sign players doesn’t officially open for another two days, but Monday represents the start of the league’s open tampering period, which comes on the heels of the league’s actual tampering period, which begins sometime over scotch and sodas at Prime 47 during the NFL combine. There are deals already locked and loaded, ready to be formally announced the second the tampering window cracks open. And I am ready for them. In fact, I’m so hyped for free agency that I slept poorly the night before, which means that my wife slept poorly too. She’s not happy about that. But you have to understand, my darling … no reasonable person can get a good night’s rest if they don’t know which midlevel center will be playing for their team next season.

Today I’ll finally get some answers. Or at least, vaguely worded dispatches from Josina Anderson that may or may not ramp up the process of guiding me toward an answer. The wheeling and dealing already began in earnest days earlier. The Rams decided to fuck them picks in order to get stud Chiefs CB Trent McDuffie. The Bills fucked them picks by trading for Bears WR D.J. Moore, whose contract runs through the year 2046. And the Ravens SUPER fucked them picks in order to snag Raiders edge Maxx Crosby, a move certain to shift the balance of power in the AFC so long as there are no snags with Crosby’s impending physical (OOP-DEE!!!). That’s all the hot stove action I need to get my nipples poking out.

I have to work today, but my head isn’t in my work. It’s in my phone, where I’m already swiping down constantly to refresh my Bluesky feed for news. I’m also toggling over to our company Slack’s football channel (named #clumpdogs) to see if one of my co-workers has dropped in a nugget that I would have otherwise missed. I do a little work, then I check again. I do a little more work, and then I check another time. When I refresh my Bluesky feed, nothing has changed, same as when I last refreshed less than a minute earlier. I’m still seeing the same post about Trump doing evil Trump shit. I hate this single micropost now. It’s holding back the impending flow of NFL information, and in the rudest possible manner. I think about muting that account just so that I have something new to get pissed at on the next refresh.

Around lunchtime, the dam breaks. The Chiefs have signed Super Bowl MVP Kenneth Walker III away from the Seahawks. That’s a big move. Like every good poster, I have an internalized scale for measuring news impact that ranges from "Nawt news" to "Holy shit." Walker giving the Chiefs a viable running attack for the first time since Jamaal Charles registers more toward the Holy Shit end of my spectrum. More of an "Oh damn!” kind of transaction, but juicy enough to keep me refreshing.

There’s a personal angle to today’s activities. My team is in the market for a quarterback, and they’ll be picking from a motley collection of washouts who either weren’t good enough (Tua Tagovailoa) or weren’t cheap enough (also Tua Tagovailoa) to stay with their current teams. I have these quarterbacks ranked in order of personal preference. My team isn’t winning a Super Bowl next year, by the way. They don’t even have any cap room to get better. In fact, their owners came out at the combine and were like, We spent a shitload last year for a team that sucked, so don’t expect us to go trading for Joe Burrow anytime soon. Thus, I lost a decent night’s sleep in anticipation of them making moves that could render them merely watchable in 2026. I regret nothing.

I scroll, I refresh, and then I analyze. Malik Willis, the best prospect in a dire QB class, goes off the board to the Dolphins. I kind of liked Willis for my team, but now that he’s elsewhere I think he’ll suck. Willis will replace the broken-in-every-conceivable-way Tagovailoa, who will take up nearly $100 million on Miami’s books after being released by the team. I refresh again and Tagovailoa has signed with the Falcons. Atlanta now has both he and Michael Penix in their QB room, which means that Taylor Heinicke will start 10 games for them next season. Signing Tua isn’t a good move, but it’s notable enough for me to post a throwaway joke about it for clout. If you’re joke-worthy during free agency, you get extra Drew points.

Speaking of jokes, four truly putrid teams have decided to go hog wild with their available cap room. The Jets have stocked up old guys, including former Bengal Joseph Ossai. Remember when Joseph Ossai blew the AFC title game for Cincinnati five years ago? Well he’s a Jet now. Thinking that they had been freed from having to pay Maxx Crosby, the Raiders have made a series of “we’re serious this time” moves, including handing Ravens C Tyler Linderbaum a $27 million AAV deal that makes every other team shit a brick. The Titans ink Jonathan Franklin-Myers, the crown jewel DT of this class. And then there are the Saints, who never have any cap room but have still found a way to sign Travis Etienne, Kaden Elliss, and even a punter in Ryan Wright. A good punter. My team’s punter.

Ah yes, my team. They warned me that they’d be relatively idle this week, and holy shit have they ever made good on it. Wright is gone. Promising WR Jalen Nailor is gone to Vegas. All they’ve done to counter these losses has been to sign a rotational cornerback, albeit one with decent PFF grades. In the coming months, I’ll be thinking about this shitty CB3 far more often than I ought to.

Meanwhile, the QBs are flying off the board as the week drags on. I pull down to refresh and Willis is gone. Now Tua is gone (phew!). Now Geno Smith is back in New York, hopefully with a sturdier jaw on him. Now the Colts have slapped the transition tag on Daniel Jones (no one knows what this means), now they have a deal agreed upon (phew because I don’t want him), except now that deal hasn’t quite been finalized yet (shit), only now it has (yayyy). My team is running out of dance partners. Hell, even Marcus Mariota isn’t available anymore. I can’t spend another year watching J.J. McCarthy strain both hamstrings while coming up with a new nickname for himself. I will stay glued to my phone until I’m presented with news that promises me I won’t have to.

I refresh my feed again. Even as dusk arrives and the news slows to a drip, I stay swiping, down down down. I refresh so many times, I’m surprised I haven’t broken skin. Every time I put my phone down, even to go pee, I might miss something. And if a major story pops up at any point during this surfing trip, I feel like my refreshing efforts MADE that news happen. So congrats to you for landing Mike Evans, San Francisco 49ers. I did that.

It’s been a gorgeous week outside, by the way. Revelatory. But I don’t have time for the sun. I’m standing by for news. This is a familiar position for me, and has been since 2016. Ever since President Florsheim fired James Comey during his first term, I have stood by for news. I have refreshed over and over again, in hopes of seeing a breaking story that will change my life for the better: Trump dying, Trump being imprisoned, my team swinging a trade for Lamar Jackson. None of these things happened, nor will they ever, but that hasn’t stopped me from refreshing, from sitting on my ass and waiting for salvation, rather than leaving my home to actually go find it. What am I gonna do, WAIT to look at the news? Absurd. I refuse to be the last person to know that the Steelers have traded for terminally overrated slob Michael Pittman. That would make me a loser. I need that information as soon as it can be processed, if only so I can make a pithy observation about it. The world needs me on internet duty, or else it will die.

Now it’s the end of the day Tuesday and the first wave of free agency is effectively over, even before legal free agency is poised to begin. As a rule, you never want to sign guys on the first day of the tampering period. So my team did a good job holding their fire, I suppose. But their inaction has burned me out for the moment. I shouldn’t be here. I should be somewhere where I can hear seagulls. At the very least, I should be outside, where the good lord wants me to be.

So I go outside to clean my grill. And lemme tell you, I clean the SHIT out of that grill, scrubbing on my hands and knees like my wicked stepmother has forced me to do it. While I scrub creosote from the grates and vents, I think about all of the things that could be happening on my phone while I’m away from it. Maybe once I’ve gotten the Weber clean as a whistle, I’ll come back to news that my team not only signed a bunch of useful players, but that they also traded for three different All-Pros, all while remaining blissfully cap compliant. And hey, maybe Trump finally HAS died. You never know! I can’t wait to find out what’s waiting for me once I get back inside.

The grill is clean, and I am now freshly showered. I check my phone, hoping that my absence has made the news cycle busier. But it hasn’t. Literally no free agency transactions have occurred while I was gone, and Trump is still frustratingly alive. I figured this would happen. Knew it in my bones, really. I’ve experiences this kind of letdown so many times, it’s practically become a ritual. I know how the world is, and I know how eager it is to disappoint me…

But.

But what if I’m off the grid and something truly earth-shattering DOES happen? What if everyone learns this news before me? What if I don’t get to claim rights to firsties? What if the rest of social media gets to fire off an Aaron Rodgers joke before I even have the chance to? These questions nag at me, even well after I’ve learned—literally hundreds of times over—that the answers to them don’t matter at all. That’s why today, Wednesday, I’m still inside with my phone, standing by for news. Hey, Trey Hendrickson just signed with the Ravens! I did that. I'll stand here forever to keep making the news happen if I have to. Odds are that I will.