The best way for the circus to make money is when the circus isn’t in town. In American sports, no league has mastered that reality like the NFL.
From the Super Bowl to Week 1, the league has developed many ways to attract attention and drive interest when it’s not football season. Prior to 2006, June 1 was the occasion for a fresh wave of free agency. In 2026, June 1 made a major comeback.
The trades of defensive end Myles Garrett, defensive end Jared Verse, and receiver A.J. Brown made it a big week for the NFL. And it raises the question of whether the league and its teams will further embrace the possibility of making deals on June 1 in the future.
It’s a point raised at the tail end of an article from ESPN reviewing the trades that happened last Monday.
“I think the league will [lean into] the June 1 thing,” an unnamed AFC executive told ESPN. “It’s the summer, it’s slow, and these deals are good engagement for the league.”
They also need to be good for the teams involved, and the primary benefit for the seller comes from trading bloated contracts in the hopes of reducing the cap consequences in the current year. That’s why June 1 used to be a major date for free agency; before teams could release up to two veterans with a post-June 1 designation in March, they had to hold the contracts until June in order to spread the dead money over two years.
But if teams are willing to move highly-paid veterans — and if other teams are willing to give up significant compensation to get them — June 1 can become yet another date to circle, every year. And, yes, at some level, the NFL wants to have more tentpole events at a time when the three-ring circus is in mothballs.
After the Browns proposed expanding the universe of future picks that could be traded from three years to five (and the Rams coincidentally agreed), Rams president Kevin Demoff said, “Nothing creates more interest in the NFL than trades. This is why Cleveland’s proposal to allow teams to trade picks up to 5 years out as opposed to 3 years out makes so much sense. More picks to trade = more trades = more interest & team building options.”
The option of building a team and generating interest with June 1 trades has been hiding in plain sight, for years. In 2026, the NFL got a taste of what that day could become, if the trend continues.