NFL Free Agency Impact
How spending in free agency translates to more wins
The NFL is known as the league with the most parity. Every year there are teams that go from the bottom of the division to the playoffs. The way the NFL builds the schedule with last place teams playing last place teams, and first place teams playing first place teams, it helps to create movement in team wins from year to year. Another way is the use of free agency. Yes, free agency was created to the benefit of the player, but the league as a whole has benefited from improvement a team can make by opening up their wallets.
The chart is a demonstration of how overall spending in free agency can help a team improve on prior seasons wins.
Instead of looking at the spending rank year over year, I grouped the teams into clusters. The Top Spenders are the 12 highest spending teams in free agency. The Bottom Spenders are the 10 lowest spending teams, and the middle is the remaining 10 teams. As you can see, 60% of the top spending teams improve by at least 1 win over the prior season. That’s pretty good. When adding in the teams that win the same number of games, then 76% of teams either have the same number of wins or improve on the prior season. That’s really good.
On the other side, 50% of the middle spenders and 51% of bottom spenders lose 1 or more games. In fact these 2 clusters have an overall performance that is nearly identical. The below chart breaks down the season over season performance by spend and win categories. It shows that the middle spenders have had more trouble improving in recent years, with a shift to No Change from Improved. The number of middle spend teams that lose more is consistent year over year.
That provides a bit more clarity, but still doesn’t show completely why the middle and bottom spenders need to be treated differently. To see the impact, we need another metric, the average win change. This will help us see why more middle spending teams are losing more, but not as much as bottom spending teams.
Looking at this report we can see that overall middle spending teams don’t have much change in total wins. The bottom spenders lose 1 more game on average than the prior season. A few times the bottom spenders had an improvement in average win change, but over the 7 season these teams are more likely to lose more than win.
Now that we have an understanding of how free agency spending can have an impact on the upcoming teams performance, lets take a look at which teams are spending money this year. The below chart shows the 32 teams in order of free agency spending, with the bar showing how much they’ve spent. The top-12 spending teams are in the charcoal color while the bottom and middle spending teams are in light gray. It also shows the number of games that team won last year, the dot, and the 2025-26 season win total, orange line.
This chart helps show why expectations for improvement in New England are high. I also like the hire of Vrabel as head coach, so perhaps New England does have a chance to compete for the playoffs this year. Minnesota is the 2nd highest spender, but it will be hard for them to improve on the 14 win season from 2024-25. Chicago and Green Bay are also top-12 spenders, while Detroit is a middle spending team. Does this mean we’ll have a new NFC North Division winner?
This chart also helps us see why their is improvement in top spenders. Looking at the 2024-25 season wins we see that of the 10 lowest winning teams, 6 of them were top-12 free agency spenders.
