Note: The following post goes into the inaccuracies that will liekly come out of my effort to grade the free agencies of the various teams thus far. If you fall asleep during math lectures, hate stats, and/or don't give a rat's ass about the "numbers behind the numbers", I recommend you skip past this post and move on to the next one. I thought I would give you fair warning.
I am inclined to move forward to the draft fairly quickly, but it would be out of keeping with this dynasty to not provide a recap of free agency to this point. Largely, there are no remaining big time free agents--at least that are expected to make so big a spalsh next year that it is worth spending too much time on them.
So how teams have fared thus far in free agency is probably a good indication of how their whole offseason--excepting the draft, of course--is and will be going.
I have devised a relatively simple way of showing who looks to have gained a lot, and who looks to have dropped. I feel I should warn you, though. The statisticians out there may cringe, because I can't say that even talent gains or losses in any particular areas are all that accurate. To undertake a truly accurate look at free agency would take an exhausting amount of time. So I devised a quick spreadsheet method based on the Roster Strengths pages.
What makes it so potentially inaccurate is that I make very little effort to make the roster strengths for the teams match up across the whole free agent process.
For instance, the first time I measure the quality of the rosters is at the end of last season. So they are judged using my scout last year, and including players soon to be retired.
Then the next time I measure is just before free agency, when I have a new scout, making it difficult to judge how much the differences I see are due to retirement/free agent losses and how much simply from having changed scouts.
The third time I do the measure is at the point it is at now, after free agency and before the draft. This should be on a similar scale to the second time (same scout).
None of this takes into account the fact that the Roster Strengths screens are based on a relative system, in which the strongest team at a position is assigned '100' and the weakest '0', and then a scale between the abilities of the two units' strengths is set up and divided into a hundred parts. What you see is how many "parts" along the scale a team is away from the weakest and closer to the strongest.
So for instance, a Patriots team with a 98 in Quarterback is just a shade less than the "curve-setting" '100' team, let's say Tennessee. That is relatively intuitive. What you need to consider, though, is that, since the '100' and '0' teams won't necessarily stay at the same talent level or even the same teams won't be in place at the ends of the scale, the scale itself will constantly be changing and comparing RB before free agency to after free agency might be so different it is akin to the old adage of comparing apples to oranges.
Still, there's a very general accuracy to it, so I will apply it so (generally), and not take too much from the specifics, which are more prone to severe error individually.
On top of all that, I also make no effort to add in weights for positions, to make QB, for instance, more important than FB, and I also don't use multiple numbers for positions with multiple members (wide receivers don't count twice just because they have two players instead of one in a starting lineup, for instance, and I haven't even given a thought as to whether they should or not--way too complicated for what I want to do).
So having said all that, take the following numbers in the follow up posts with a grain of salt. They may not be as accurate as it seems.
But, hey, we don't want to really know who the big winners in free agency are right away anyway, do we? Grading free agency is more of a gut feeling than a mathematical exercise anyway.
So, without further ado, here's my system. Each team will have listed it's total average Roster Strength at the end of last season, and averages for the offense and defense. Then I will show the same averages for right now. And then end with the difference.
My determination of who the winners and losers are is solely based on that final difference.
You'll see what I am talking about when I start things up here.
Chief Rum