The NFL’s gaga receiver market is the straw that’s stirring this year’s draft

What happens when the league’s tragicomedy franchise hands a market-resetting contract to a middling receiver? Lunacy. Absolute lunacy.

The stench of the four-year, $72m deal that the Jaguars handed to Christian Kirk in the opening hours of free agency wafted through the halls of Vegas during the first round of the NFL draft on Thursday. Someday soon, we’ll look back on the Kirk signing as the first domino that injected chaos into the NFL’s carefully calibrated ecosystem – a sliding doors moment that will swing divisional races, title games and that most vapid of terms: Legacies.

Ever since Jacksonville signed Kirk, the league’s wide receiver market had turned gaga. Do you pay your star receiver? Do you not? If you don’t, will he play? Is it better to try to recreate your star’s success in the aggregate with a couple of cheap rookies or tie him down to a long-term deal that absorbs an eye-watering percentage of the salary cap?

For the better part of a month, superstar receivers have taken the answers into their hands, eyeing the contract first and figuring out which team will hand it to them later.

The names of players who’ve moved read like a who’s who of the All-Pro ballot. First, there was Green Bay dealing Davante Adams to the Raiders. The Tyreek Hill-to-Miami deal followed. On draft night, Titans star AJ Brown joined the growing list of Big Name Receivers On The Move – the Titans trading Brown to the Eagles for a first-round pick. All signed record-shattering deals as soon as their moves were finalized.

The Ravens jumped into the game, too, sending Hollywood Brown to the Cardinals for a late first-round pick, a move that wasn’t exactly endorsed by quarterback Lamar Jackson.

Meanwhile, the specter of a Deebo Samuel