Titans Bargain Hunting Not Paying Off - FanHouse - AOL Sports Blog

It's been several years since the Titans entered cap hell in their attempt to keep the Steve McNair-Eddie George Super Bowl team together. But you wouldn't know it from the Titans offseason moves.

While other teams are aggressively signing free agents to big money deals, the Titans have decided that they aren't going to pay some of the insane prices for what is a pretty below average free agent class. So other teams can give top free agents like Asante Samuel and Bernard Berrian budget-busting contracts. And Antwan Odom, Jacob Bell, Randy Starks and Travis LaBoy can leave without barely a shrug--the Titans don't think they're worth their $20-million+ contracts.

So the Titans have plucked tight end Alge Crumpler for a Wal-mart-style two years, $5 million. Tennessee brought back the shell of Jevon Kearse for two-years, $6 million. Those two signings together add up to less than what the Bengals will give Odom over the next two seasons. But then Kearse has played a grand total of 10 games in the last two years, while LaBoy and Odom are just entering the prime of his career. It's hard to call Kearse an upgrade at defensive end unless we can count on him being healthy for the first time in years.
Bargain shopping may sound like a wise approach, but the reality is that the Titans seem to be failing to understand one of the key aspects of the 2008 free agent market. Everyone seems to be overpriced because almost every team has cap room. And now, unlike the Titans, most teams are doing a very good job of re-signing their own soon to be free agents, which keeps the best talent off of the free agent market.

If Tennessee had managed to re-up Odom and Bell before free agency began, their inactivity would be less maddening. But as we head toward the draft, it's hard to say that the team has really done much of anything to improve on last year's non-playoff squad. The same thing could have been said last year, when a couple of high-profile free agent signings might have been the difference between a mediocre receiving corps and a good one, and the difference between making it past the first round of the playoffs and not.

Titans general manager Mike Reinfeldt clearly has a plan--he wants to bargain hunt and wait for the big money to run out so that he can sign players on the cheap. But by the time we get to that point in this year's free agency, there may be no one left worth signing.

And if the Titans end up falling short of the playoffs again, it'll be hard not to wonder if keeping a couple of the now-departed free agents, or signing a star receiver couldn't have been the difference.