Does NFL Free Agency Matter?

How free agency spending impacts upcoming season wins

As NFL free agency is about to start, I wanted to examine the importance of free agency, and how it might impact a teams performance in the upcoming season. I created a dashboard to help me with the analysis. Charted results instead of a table allow for faster interpretation of the data, and quickens decision making.

And the color of the dot is determined based on the number of wins; green if the team won more games and red if they didn’t. I also shaded the top-12 spending teams in a different color to help identify them more easily. As you can easily see, 7 of top 12 spending teams improved wins over prior year and 5 did not.

In fact if you look at the results from each season, you will see that this pattern continues.

It’s not until we get to the 2018 and 2016 seasons that we start to see some different results.

Having this information is great, but how can we use this to determine how many more wins or losses you should expect for your team this year? For that, I like to look at the averages of the results. As the charts clearly show, some teams do not win more games after being a top-12 spender, so we need to find the happy middle between the best and worst results. Here is a look at the average win change by season for the top-12 spenders since 2011:

Over the past 13 seasons, the top-12 spending NFL teams in free agency go on to win an average of 0.7 more games a season. I’ll round up and call that 1. The average changes from season to season, and has been on a downward trend the past 3 seasons, but this looks like typical cyclical behavior over 4-5 year stretches. To help interpret results I flipped into a chart, added a trend line and the confidence bands for that trend line.

This helps solidify the belief that a top-12 spending team should expect to see a 1 game improvement in wins from the prior season. The trend line is moving in an upward fashion, and the bottom confidence band flattens off right around the results from 2023 of 0.3, so the average should always remain positive. And since the last few years having been below average, I would expect that the top-12 spenders this year will see a better result in win average. It probably won’t be as good as the spike from 2018 to 2019, but I like the improvement line from 2011-2013, indicating free agent spending could have a bigger impact over the next 2 years.

What about bottom spending teams?

As we saw in the bar charts above, the teams to the far right of those charts (bottom spenders), have what appear to be an abundance of red dots indicating the won less games than the prior year. Just like the top-12 spenders, I looked at the yearly averages for the bottom-12 spenders, and charted them with a trend line and confidence bands.

As you can see from the results of these charts, the average win change from prior year is all over the place. The trend line is moving at an upward trend, indicating that not spending in free agency won’t have as much of an impact on a team in the future. However, the confidence bands have a larger projected split moving forward, indicating that average win change for this group will continue to be volatile.

I believe these are good indicators to take away, and can be useful when looking to make season win total or division winner future bets. It shows something we all know, throwing money at problems helps, but the fact that a handful of top spenders win less games and bottom spenders win more games demonstrates their is more at stake. Injuries can have a big impact on a teams results for the season, and just because your team can write the biggest check in the offseason, doesn’t mean they can keep the players motivated and on the field when it matters.

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