It’s always difficult to really read how any team’s offseason goes because, in reality, most of the free agency moves in the NFL involve players who are not game-changers.
So the challenge is for GMs to adequately address their team’s weaknesses with depth options while avoiding giving out contracts that will prove problematic down the line.
This year, that’s more difficult than ever because of a diminished salary cap. We actually saw a lot of deals that were purposely backloaded because the deflation of the cap by the pandemic should be fixed by a new TV deal soon.
Still, we have some sense of which organizations managed to strike the right balance between adding and spending, so we’ve graded them accordingly.
These grades are definitely on a curve: We’re not simply looking at which teams added the most talent, but instead taking into account which teams did the most with the salary cap space it had.
