Falcons rank No. 1 in annual offseason improvement index

While it’s nice to see, we probably shouldn’t park money for those playoff tickets just yet.

We know the Atlanta Falcons are an improved football team. While we can’t know just how improved until they actually play the games, to say nothing of getting through the NFL Draft and the long summer ahead, it would be difficult to quibble with the idea that they’re probably moderately-to-drastically better on offense, which should lift the larger team. But just how improved is this team now, before the draft and a seemingly inevitable (if small) second wave of free agency?

Kevin Cole, a longtime “data scientist” at Pro Football Focus, has continued his work on his annual improvement index now that he’s out on his own at his newsletter, Unexpected Points. As he puts it:

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.

By his reckoning, the Falcons are the most improved team after a couple of weeks of free agency, and by a fairly significant margin.

What’s driving this? The Falcons have not lost any impact players on defense to this point, though they have yet to replace useful contributors like Calais Campbell and Bud Dupree, so there’s no expected cratering in defensive results despite a changeover in the coaching staff on that side of the ball. The offense, meanwhile, now boasts a significant upgrade at quarterback, a pair of additions at receiver expected to be major lifts over what the Falcons had behind Drake London a year ago, and no significant losses. Kirk Cousins over Desmond Ridder/Taylor Heinicke likely accounts for much of this projected improvement.

This goes along with the broader sense in the league and among league media that the Falcons are a team on the rise, having shaken up an underachieving coaching staff by firing Arthur Smith and moving on from several staff members on offense and with the aforementioned investments in the roster.

It is worth noting that standing atop this index has been a mixed bag for teams, as you’d expect given that free agency is not a cure-all. For every Cardinals team in 2020 (5-10-1 in 2019, 8-8 in 2020) that improves from the basement to some sort of relevance and 2021 Patriots (7-9 to 10-7) that boosted their way to contention, there’s a disastrous 2022 Broncos squad, which went from 7-10 in 2021 to 5-12 despite a big offseason spending spree that included the ill-fated Russell Wilson trade. The 2023 Jets were stuck in neutral post-Aaron Rodgers injury, though that’s not something you could predict, and went 7-10 in back-to-back years.

As is the case with most offseason metrics and hype, there is real reason to be excited about this, but plenty of reasons not to put too much stock into what’s happened to this point until we see the full offseason and the actual play on the field to follow it. The Falcons are undeniably better on offense than they were at the end of this past season, and with the investments still to come on defense expected to lift this squad further, they certainly will have the look of one of the league’s most improved teams by the summer. The trick is translating an encouraging position on a chart into results.