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UPDATE: It’s official. “Legal tampering” window starts tomorrow (Monday) at 11:00 AM Central, which is also the deadline for franchise/transition tag designations. Free agency starts at 3:00 PM Central on Wednesday.
Now official. NFL sent memo to teams, informing them: Negotiation window noon tomorrow. League year weds. Franchise designation ends tomorrow at noon. Official.
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) March 15, 2020
We’ve been waiting to hear about whether or not the National Football League will start the 2020 League Year on Wednesday as scheduled, and if one of the sport’s leading reporters is to be believed, we may have our answer.
Multiple people across the league now are anticipating that the start of the league year will not be moved and it will start on time, per sources. There still are ongoing conversations, and it still could change, but there is a different tone from teams as if it is happening now.
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) March 15, 2020
Adam Schefter of ESPN is reporting that the start of the league year, which is supposed to happen at 3:00 PM Central time on Wednesday, will happen as scheduled and will not be pushed back.
This doesn’t mean anything for the 2020 NFL Draft, necessarily, as there are rumblings that it could be postponed and/or moved to a different location, but this means that the start of free agency will be upon us in just a couple of days.
I suppose that free agency wouldn’t necessarily involve a lot of movement, as most of the negotiations could be done over the phone. Sure, there might not be any big introductory press conferences for new free agent signings or anything like that, but that really isn’t terribly important and the teams could schedule those sorts of things once the Coronavirus situation settles down and greater freedom of movement is viable.
We’re expecting to see a lot of guys that we’ve seen with the Minnesota Vikings over the past few years moving on to different locations during free agency, and we’ll do our best to update you on all of the moves as we can. We don’t expect the Vikings to be active players as far as adding free agents, but we’ll obviously have that for you here, too.
But, it sounds like all of the action of free agency is going to start happening on Wednesday as planned.