12 NFL Off-Season Dates Fans Need To Know

The NFL has the shortest season of any of the 4 major sports in America. And yet, it is the league that never sleeps. Even in the off-season, the NFL can dominate headlines between Free Agency, League Meetings, the draft, mini camps. Even rule changes will sometimes garner more discussion than the actual games being played in other leagues.

So now with the Super Bowl behind us, let’s look at the NFL Off-Season. Here are all the dates NFL fans need to be aware of.

The NFL has a system intended to help teams keep their star players called Franchise tags. Teams can place a tag on one of their players set to be Free Agents, keeping them on the team for another season. In turn, the player gets paid a top rate for their position, but lose the ability to hit free agency for a year.

In practice, they don’t get used much because of the damage they sometimes do to the relationship between players in teams. Most players don’t want to play on them because of the lack of long-term security. But there are teams that still use them. And they can start putting them on their pending free agents starting February 17th.

Few leagues make as big a deal about their combine as the NFL. But the league makes it a spectacle. A week's worth of coverage of the next crop of NFL players running drills and working out for NFL teams.

But more than that, it is where a lot of negotiations take place. All the NFL scouts, agents, coaches, and GMs are in one place. It may not strictly be allowed, but the combine is where many of the deals that will be announced during legal tampering, and where many eventual trades are first negotiated.

March 3rd is the last chance for teams to place a franchise tag on a pending free agent.

“Legal Tampering” is the first chance for teams to legally contact pending free agents and negotiate contracts. They can't become official yet, but pending deals can be announced starting March 9th at Noon.

In reality, teams have already been in contact with players through their agents. Deals are announced within the first hour of Legal Tampering, and NFL contracts are a bit complicated to actually work out that quickly.

As mentioned earlier, GMs and Agents are already discussing these moves during the NFL Combine. It is not technically allowed, but everyone does it, and as long as no one publicly admits it, looking at you Kirk Cousins, the league very rarely takes any action on it. There is an easy cover for why teams would be talking to an agent at the combine. Many represent players at the combine, so as long as it is not too blatant, the league looks the other way.

But during the tampering period, those negotiations can become public knowledge. No deal is official yet though. A deal can be announced, then ripped up before it is actually signed. Famously, Frank Gore was an Eagle for a day before he ripped that deal up and signed with the Colts instead.

Starting at 4 pm on March 11th, players can sign deals, making them official. Many of the big names will have already agreed to deals by this time, but now teams will be able to announce them. Any trades negotiated can also become official.

Somehow, the NFL can make discussing rule changes a national headline. Last year, during the League Meetings, the NFL dominated headlines with the talks to ban the “Tush Push.” This year, that will likely be a thing again.

One interesting change we may see this year concerns the refs themselves. The Refs CBA with the league is up in May. You may remember the ref lockout in 2012. So we could start to hear rumblings of any disagreements between the Refs Union and the league here. It also sounds like the league wants to do more to keep refs accountable.

Restricted Free Agents have until April 17th to sign offer sheets. If you are unaware of what a Restricted Free Agent means, here is the description from the NFL website.

“A player with three accrued seasons and an expired contract. RFAs are free to negotiate and sign with any team, but their original team can offer them one of various qualifying offers ("tenders") that come with the Right of First Refusal and/or draft-pick compensation. If the tender is withdrawn by a team, the RFA becomes an unrestricted free agent.”

The draft takes place in Pittsburgh this year. Teams get their chance to take the next crop of NFL players. No league competes with the NFL in how much of a spectacle its draft is. The league takes over a city each year, and the event draws huge TV ratings, higher than those of the actual games in other sports.

The draft is a 3-day process. The first round takes place on April Third, a Thursday night. Rounds 2 and 3 are on that Friday night. Then finally, rounds 4-7 take place on Saturday from Noon until whenever the last pick is made. Even after that, Undrafted Free Agents take up the rest of the day’s headlines.

Teams get a 5th-year option for any player drafted in the 5th round. May 1st is the deadline to activate that option for players from the 2023 draft. Players from that draft are also now free to sign extensions.

If declined, it means those players will be free agents the following off-season, unless an extension is reached at a later date.

Teams get their first chances to see their rookies on the field together in early May. They get a 2-day window, from either May 1 – 4 or May 8 –11, to bring their rookies in and work them out.

Oftentimes, the league does not handle all of its business at the League Meetings in April. They have another round of meetings in the Spring. We saw the Tush push debate carry into the Spring Meetings last year.

Actual start dates vary from team to team, but training camps start to open in mid-July. Last year, the first team to start was the Chargers on July 12th, nd the last team to report was the Steelers on July 23rd.