2025 NFL Offseason: Improvement Index for all 32 teams

Projecting point-differential gains and losses based on offseason moves for every NFL team

** Numbers updated through March 20th

Five years ago, I developed the Improvement Index — a way to quantify the value gained and lost by each team in the offseason.

The index is built on the rigorously researched NFL Plus/Minus metric, which translates player values into intuitive, concrete and position-agnostic currency of points added or lost. The index is the point differential gain or loss each team during the offseason, beginning with the first signing of released players.

The model behind the Improvement Index projects the numbers of snaps and per-play efficiency for each player in every facet of offensive and defensive play: passing, rushing, receiving, blocking, pass rush, run defense and coverage. These models were trained on years of historical data, going back to 2006.

The model incorporates player- and team-level assumptions based on each player’s prior performance, team coaching tendencies, forecasted opponents, and championship odds. These features help the model estimate the likely allocation of snaps among each position group and the likely points-added/lost per snap for each player based on that usage and historical trends.

Some teams will move on the improvement index even if they haven’t added or dropped an influential player, as the total point differential gains must net to zero, i.e. one team’s point differential gains must be offset by others’ losses, and vice versa.

Also, the team losing a player will not have the opposite point-differential gain/loss as the team gaining a player, as different quality of players will be gaining and losing snaps on those teams, e.g. the Raiders gain fewer points trading for Geno Smith to replace a combination of Gardner Minshew and Aidan O’Connell than the Seahawks lose with Sam Howell topping the current depth chart (that will likely change), because the upgrade from Minshew/O’Connell to Smith is projected to be less than the drop-off from Smith to Howell.

Each day, the Improvement Index plot below will be updated, along with a table of all the players joining a new team, with estimates for points-added above a replacement-level player at their positions. It’s important to remember that the points above replacement level number will not match the team gains, as the latter will mostly be based on snaps shifting between better than replacement-level players.

Here is the movement in the index, generated by the confirmed transactions, through 12 p.m. Thursday, March 20th. Released players will not be added until they’re official added the NFL transaction list, as teams often use the threat of release to renegotiate a contract or find trade partners. Trades will be added when multiple NFL insiders report them, along with signings.

The index includes the effects of relative draft capital for each team, going by the expected points added by draft slot. Most of the advantages are netted out, but some teams do have materially higher/lower expected value in the 2025 NFL draft.

The full list of player movement and value added is available on the Unexpected Points subscriber Google sheet (for paid subscribers). Below the main plot of value shifts by team, there are tables for each division with the exact numbers by division.