Making and spending billions of dollars - Ingles

After more than four months of fighting over money, the National Football League has proved — in four of the most frenetic and expensive days in its history — that it did not forget how to spend it.
From the moment team owners and players signed off Monday on an agreement to end the league’s longest work stoppage, a nonstop, high-stakes, almost drunken shopping spree has been under way in an extraordinary talent bazaar. Hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts have been committed and shed in a flurry of signings, trades, renegotiations and cuts, as teams, prohibited from making deals for four months, race to prepare for the start of preseason games next month.

The competitive landscape has been altered by transactions both expected and stunning, some of them involving the game’s most coveted players — the quarterbacks. And the biggest one is still to come, with Peyton Manning, the Indianapolis Colts superstar, soon expected to receive a contract that will make him the highest-paid player in the game’s history.

Other eye-popping deals have already been agreed to:

- Cornerback Nnamdi Asomugha, the most coveted free agent this year, shocked the league by signing with the Philadelphia Eagles on Friday night.

- Quarterback Kevin Kolb was given more than $20 million guaranteed in a contract by the Arizona Cardinals — about $3 million for each of his seven career starts.

- In Tampa, Fla., Michael Koenen, a punter who is rarely on the field, received $6.5 million guaranteed from the Buccaneers.

- In New England, the Patriots acquired at little cost two of the N.F.L.’s brilliant if controversial talents, defensive tackle Albert Haynesworth and receiver Chad Ochocinco.

Agents have had little sleep, and front offices are overwhelmed, but the compressed off-season has been a riveting spectacle for fans and an unexpected boon for a league eager to put the lockout behind it.

“The reaction is clear: everyone wants to get back to football, and I’m thrilled we’re there,” Commissioner Roger Goodell said Friday. “Condensing free agency, rookie signings, trades and camp openings into basically one week is like the best roller-coaster ride ever, and no one wants to get off. Everyone wants to stay connected to the N.F.L. every minute right now because you might miss something. It’s a fan frenzy and we love it.”

According to N.F.L. figures, viewership for the league-owned NFL Network on Tuesday and Wednesday, which included hour after hour of live coverage of player moves, more than tripled over this time last year, when little was happening in the days before training camps opened. And traffic on NFL.com this week has more than doubled from last year.

That raises the question: why not do it this way every year? While squeezing all transactions into one week is unrealistic in a regular year, this week’s intense fan interest could prompt the N.F.L. to consider moving the start of free agency from the traditional midnight opening to a morning start, allowing it to be televised.

“We are always looking for ways to create more fan interest,” Goodell said.

The N.F.L. moved on so quickly from its off-season doldrums that on Friday morning, Patriots fans in Foxborough, Mass., chanted, “Ocho! Ocho!” at the end of practice, even though Ochocinco, freshly arrived from Cincinnati, was not in uniform yet. His acquisition Thursday was just one of the Patriots’ head-spinning trades at little cost that brought them two of the game’s biggest headaches, Ochocinco and Haynesworth.

Their appearance in the normally drama-free Patriots locker room is low-risk with potentially high reward. The Patriots gave up only low-round draft picks to get each player, but if the Patriots get more production than distraction from them, they could help fill two critical needs for the team.

“It’s 1 thing to jump and be able to land on 2 feet, but I had no idea I was landing in Heaven,” Ochocinco wrote on his Twitter feed Friday afternoon.

Elsewhere, the risk was much greater and the fallout potentially more damaging as teams made cuts to get under the new salary cap of $120 million per team and started handing out big contracts to meet the new stipulation for mandatory cash-spending requirements. The Giants released two stalwarts of their offensive line, Shaun O’Hara and Rich Seubert.

And in North Carolina, the Panthers, who won two games last season, have been one of the most aggressive teams of all, securing defensive lineman Charles Johnson for $32 million guaranteed and running back DeAngelo Williams for $21 million guaranteed before trading for tight end Greg Olsen on Thursday. The team signed the top overall draft pick, quarterback Cam Newton, on Friday.

Receiver Sidney Rice agreed to join the Seattle Seahawks with a contract that will pay him $18.5 million guaranteed, even as the Seahawks let go of their most reliable quarterback, Matt Hasselbeck, who quickly found work in Tennessee. Reggie Bush, the former U.S.C. running back who has not quite lived up to expectations, was traded by the New Orleans Saints to the Miami Dolphins for a fresh start, and he said Friday that he had experienced every emotion in the last 48 hours.

The agent Brad Blank said: “What we used to do in an entire year, they’re doing in a few days. It’s crazy.”

It was all so much that the release of quarterback Vince Young, who used to be the Tennessee starter and was once the league’s third overall draft pick, and the signings of top draft picks were afterthoughts.

The flood was expected to continue through the weekend, with free agency officially beginning Friday night. By early next week, every team will be practicing, and clubs will begin to adjust their rosters, producing a second wave of activity.

“It was the perfect lockout,” said Marc Ganis, a sports marketing consultant who has worked with N.F.L. teams. “No real damage was done and now there is off-the-charts fan interest.” (Only one game, the preseason Hall of Fame Game held annually in Canton, Ohio, was canceled because of the work stoppage.)

Nobody knows if the frenzy will be good for the quality of football, though. With no off-season work, rookies and teams with new coaches are expected to struggle, while teams that had little turnover should thrive.

Almost everyone expects nagging injuries and sloppy play to abound, at least in the first few weeks, as players adjust to the rigors of the season and the demand for precision. With labor strife over, though, a few dropped passes and offside penalties may not matter.

“I don’t know how much people will notice,” said Charley Casserly, a former N.F.L. general manager. “I think attendance in the preseason will be up. Ratings in the preseason will be up because fan interest will be up. You wouldn’t want to script it this way, but it certainly got the N.F.L. back in the headlines.” (source New York Times)