The National Football League's trade deadline comes roughly midway through the regular season and months before the playoffs. It's curious timing for a league in which teams constantly evolve.
In 2021, an NFL MVP award is often thought of as being exclusively for quarterbacks. How could it not be? Since 2000, only four non-quarterbacks have won the Associated Press' MVP award, with signal-callers winning it nine out of the last 10 times.
Free agency moved at a breakneck pace leading up to the anticipated Dec. 1 work stoppage. There were players and teams who clearly wanted to deal before this deadline hit, and others were content to allow labor negotiations to play out.
The biggest NFL disappointments in 2021 stick out like a bad play call. They're not easy to see coming and sometimes baffling, though a team may recover given enough time. The idea applies to both teams and players or coaches after seven weeks.