Jason Fitzgerald has just written a great article at Over the Cap, explaining what teams’ profiles are in free agency. One way to look at aggressiveness is through volume. Another way to look at aggressiveness is whether teams are signing high-priced free agents.
As Fitzgerald’s data (which is shown below in graph form) points out, these two traits are generally mutually exclusive.
This data only includes players who made at least $2 million in average per year (APY) since 2020, but the Green Bay Packers rank dead last in the league with just nine qualifying signings over six seasons. Where they do rank high, though, is APY, where they fall only behind the Los Angeles Rams, another sign-few, pay-high team in the free agency market.
This is completely inverted from the Houston Texans’ strategy, where they have signed 59 players to contracts worth at least $2 million per year over six seasons (nearly 10 per year!) but rank 31st in those players’ APY among NFL teams.
Here’s what Fitzgerald said about the Texans:
Not surprisingly the Texans ranked number 1 with 59 players signed. Houston has had a tendency to sign a number of 1 year deals in free agency and then have to continuously replace those players the next year. They led the NFL with 33 one year contracts with the next closest team at just 21. This has been a consistent trend for them each year and hasn’t changed even as the team has gotten better since the selection of CJ Stroud. This has not really been a long term viable strategy followed by most winning teams so it will be interesting to see if they try to break this or not.
It’s certainly a strategy.
The Dallas Cowboys, meanwhile, buck all trends as they have signed the eighth-fewest qualifying free agents over the last six seasons and also have signed those players to deals that rank them 32nd in APY among these qualifiers. The Packers don’t swing often, but when they swing, they swing big. The Cowboys don’t swing often and swing small.