Welcome to The Athletic’s third annual NFL team free-agency rankings.
We launched this project three years ago in an attempt to answer a brief yet complex question: Does free agency really matter? Every year, the buzz around free agency only seems to grow. As the salary cap increases, so do the contracts. Winners and losers are declared by the end of March. Our goal was to take a data-driven dive into how much value teams are getting out of free agency. This year’s negotiation window kicks off Monday at noon ET, and there is sure to be plenty of player movement.
Using contract figures from Over the Cap, we determined the amount of cash spent on each of 970 free-agent signings over the past four seasons — 2021 through 2024. In 2023, we started the project with three years of data, 2020 through 2022. We added a fourth year of data in 2024, including the signings from the 2023 offseason to produce a four-year window. Now we are moving that four-year window forward, from 2021 through 2024. Even when players sign contracts of more than four years, they very rarely play on the fifth year of that contract. The cap hits inflate by that stage of a contract. There is typically little to no guaranteed money left. By that point, players will usually either sign extensions or be off the team, either by release or trade.
Kansas City Chiefs guard Joe Thuney, one of the most productive signings over the last four years, is a good example. He signed a five-year deal in 2021. He played on that deal for four years. And he was then traded to the Chicago Bears this week before he played on the fifth year of the contract for Kansas City.
For our study, we only included free-agent signings who received at least $1 million in cash. Players who were signed after the start of the regular season were not included. This is a study focused on the offseason portion of free agency. Players who re-signed with a team were also not included. The cash number was calculated only for the seasons in which a player was on his free-agent contract. If a player signed an extension, we stopped counting the cash the year the extension went into effect.
Once we had the cash amounts, we needed to cross reference against some sort of value statistic. Football does not yet have a publicly accessible all-encompassing value statistic like Wins Above Replacement in baseball. However, Pro Football Reference has a statistic called Approximate Value (AV) that is about as close as we can get. It is not perfect, and that is something to keep in mind when reviewing the results of our study. For instance, blocking tight ends are undervalued by the statistic. Pro Football Reference describes AV as “an attempt to put a single number on the seasonal value of a player at any position from any year (since 1960).” You can find a full explanation for how AV is calculated here.
We input cash spending for all 970 free agents signed between 2021 and 2024. We also input AV produced for each player while he was on his free-agent deal.
Once we had the data, we could organize it in various ways. We can sort by total AV produced to see which teams have gotten the most value out of free agents over the past four seasons, regardless of the money spent. We can sort by cash spent to see which teams were most active in free agency.
Divide the approximate value by the millions of cash spent, and you end up with how much approximate value each team produced per million spent — an indication of which teams have been most efficient in free agency over the past four seasons.
We can also sort the free agents individually to see which players produced the most total AV, as well as which players produced the most AV per $1 million cash earned.
Let’s jump in.
GO FURTHER
NFL free-agency rankings: Which teams and players deliver the best value?
