The competition for the much-coveted Who Won The Offseason Prize is nearly over. Despite a late rally from the Cleveland Browns, who became the first team to eliminate themselves from the regular season by quintupling down on the disaster that has been, is, and seems hell-bent on continuing to be Deshaun Watson, it seems clear that the winner will be the San Francisco 49ers. Besides, it's Reds Week, not Oranges Week, which means that even with that photo of Jed York in his jail smock, red is still the color of the day.
And York is part of that, too, with his arrest on Monday capping what has perhaps been the single weirdest offseason in recent NFL memory. Not only did the owner of the Red And Gold (see, we told you) get arrested near a trailer park in East Palestine, Ohio and midwife the phrase "criminal tools" into the popular lexicon, but he managed to steal center stage from his head coach Kyle Shanahan, whose auto accident in Palo Alto six weeks ago still confuses folks even after he offered not one but two explanations for it. And between them, they both trumped the ongoing urban legend of the Power Plant That Eats Football Players, a theory that was developed to explain the Niners' implausibly bad injury luck; it has been debunked by those pesky scientific types but will certainly rise again the next time a 49er gets hurt. The concept of an electrical facility that emits ligament-devouring Z-rays is too delightful to reject merely because it isn't true.
It is difficult to pinpoint just when the offseason became more important than the actual season in sports, though many people figure it was LeBron James' Year of The Decision, 2010. That was the summer when he left Cleveland, which is a small Ohio town 90 miles west-northwest of East Palestine, to pursue his bliss in Miami, before he found it again in Cleveland, which was before he found it in Los Angeles and directly before he found it in Philadelphia. Since then, each sport has sought to keep customers plugged in even without the benefit of games, hopping from the draft to the combine to free agency in the attempt to keep the suckers penned and feeding.
Most of these attempts, though, require some player involvement, either by being selected, signed, traded, or released. That all this is largely hooked into the other great volunteer scam of the last half-century, the fantasy league, makes the offseason increasingly piquant. But for sheer incident alone, offseasons have never been busier.
As with every other development in human history, there are always folks who want to tweak the system even when it isn't very systematic. This year, for example, the NBA has moved beyond the star-changes-teams staple, with all due respect to recently relocated mononym-grade superstars like Giannis, LeBron, and (maybe) Kawhi, by luring in the DIY/HGTV crowd with the novel concept of franchise flipping. The ramifications of this are potentially quite worrisome for you end-stage capitalism junkies, but this particular bit of arbitrage feels likelier to be the offseason tendance de l'année in 2027.
And though l'affaire Watson was a valiant attempt to steal the title with a 48-hour career immolation that required the active connivance of the team's coaching staff and more specifically owner Jimmy (Pride Is No Object) Haslam's front office, the crown here is San Francisco's. They won it on volume and sheer perversity, but also by tweaking the conventional understanding of the offseason to mean off-field offseason. The Niners didn't really do that much of note with their roster; Deebo Samuel and Dre Greenlaw returned on the cheap and wide receiver Ricky Pearsall becoming the runaway winner of the World's Unluckiest Athlete Cup by losing his 2026 season to PCL surgery for an injury he suffered in Week 4 of 2025, this after being shot in 2024 during a robbery attempt in which a 17-year-old was caught trying to steal his watch. Nobody has tried to directly link Pearsall's knee injury to the still-possibly-maneating local semiconductor, and the robbery attempt happened 40 miles north, far beyond even the Marvel Universe-adapted power plant's reach. No, the Niners' world-historic offseason was carried by the poor public decisions made by the team's chief decision-makers.
The only flaw in the 49ers' offseason, of course, is that neither Polymarket nor Kalshi could get prices down on either event in time, and that neither company has yet reached the full shameless stage that is next-level predicting. That, too, is probably a 2027 innovation, by which point the games will generate less media rights money than whatever shenaniganapaloozas the teams have prepped for us in the summer. We can hardly fail to wait.
