Following my month-long divisional draft & roster review series, I’m back with a little two-piece project, where instead of diving into a bunch of individual players, I looked at each team as a whole and asked myself “what is the one burning question I have for them as I think about the 2024 NFL season?”
After spending the last month reflecting on what the player acquisition process looked like for all 32 teams, with a focus on the names brought in via the draft, it’s now time to take a step back and identify the positional units that improved the most throughout this process, comparing the additions and departures at those spots.
This is purely based on the players that were brought in/let go from the point the 2023 NFL season ended onwards, not taking injuries into account. So you’re not going to find the Jets here for getting back Aaron Rodgers from the torn Achilles he suffered four snaps into his time with New York for example. Along with that, I like to take a broader look at this in terms of which position groups were stocked up best rather than just talking about a singular star performer they acquired.
Let’s dive in:
We’ve arrived at the NFL offseason and while the new league year doesn’t official start until March 13th, the franchise/transition tag period was opened on Tuesday and we can already speculate on where pending free agents could end up.
So I took on the exercise of going through all 32 NFL teams listed by effective cap space, talk about some overarching decisions ahead of them and matched each with one player about to hit the open market!
With three straight top-10 draft picks spent on their versatile skill-position group, a bruising offensive line, a promising second-year quarterback & some of the most well-rounded play-calling, the Falcons offense is about to rise up in 2023!
We take a look at all 16 AFC teams and outline the one area they should still be looking to address heading into the upcoming season, in the second half of this series.
After extensively discussing the individual players and draft classes put together by NFL teams, along with outlining the most improved position groups across the league last week, it was time for me to work through these rosters yet again and find the one area they should still be looking to address personnel-wise. We’ll start with the NFC here, as part of this two-part series!
We’ve entered a point of the NFL offseason, where rosters are largely finalized, in terms of free agents being signed, veterans being extended or traded elsewhere, the draft nearly two months in the past now and only a few bigger names still on the open market, who to some degree are awaiting potential injuries or just looking to skip OTAs, before they sign somewhere.
So at this stage, I think it’s a helpful exercise to compare what rosters and specific position groups/units look like compared to a year ago. I went through each of them and outlined the one team that improved the most in that area, along without another group or two, which deserved an honorable mention.
Please keep in mind that I tried to judge the upgrades made as a whole, rather than just pointing at a franchise that brought in only one true difference-maker. And this is just based on player acquisitions from the end of this past season onwards, meaning no injuries or other factors that kept guys already under contract off the field.
We continue our divisional draft & roster review series, switching from the NFC to the AFC North!
Once again, I’ll give a quick scouting report on every single player selected, talk about each team’s class overall & at the end of the video, rank those four against each other!
We’ve spent a ton of time talking about all these highly-rated prospects for the NFL Draft and where they landed. So I wanted to once again show love to the guys who didn’t hear their names called, but have now been signed as UDFAs and have a chance to still make their mark on the league.
I settled on six players on offense and defense each, who I thought are in a situation to quickly make an impact – whether that’s actually having a chance to start at some point this this year or just fill a certain role for their new team. I tried to not include players that are widely considered to have gone undrafted due to medical red flags, although I added (at least) one more name for all the teams I didn’t mention among these twelve, at the end of this piece.
Here’s the list:
The 2023 NFL offseason is here and before we fully indulge in draft content, I wanted to talk a little about free agency and in particular match all 32 teams with a player bound to hit the open market. We’re going from one to 32 based on available cap space!
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