Post-Draft 2024 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 June 3rd. This update includes position-specific projections for rookies, plus the dozens of smaller transactions that have taken place since the end of the NFL draft.

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 as more points by signing Gardner Minshew than the Colts lose, because the upgrade from Aidan O’Connell to Minshew is projected to be greater than the drop-off from Minshew to Anthony Richardson (seen as a flat move - for this year, at least).

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 8:00 am Monday, June 3rd.

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.