How Can Free Agency Help Teams Win the Super Bowl?
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 19 February 2025
⏱️ 72 minutes
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Summary
For years, free agency lessons are typically framed about how teams falter in the market. But the 2024 Eagles were a shining example of how the right injection of free-agent talent can propel a team to a championship. With this year's champs in mind, Robert Mays and Derrik Klassen looked through the past decade of Super Bowl participants to see what lessons we can learn about the right ways to use FA. How many teams spent big? How important were the right bargain signings? And what advice, if any, can we give to teams looking for the right boost from the veteran pool in 2025?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. |
| 0:07.7 | I'm Robert Mays. |
| 0:08.8 | Got sort of a fun idea for you guys today. |
| 0:11.0 | I've always felt like this period of the calendar was a little bit awkward in the NFL |
| 0:15.1 | offseason. |
| 0:16.1 | We got the combine next week, but that's kind of a draft event, but it's kind of not. |
| 0:21.1 | And free agency is going to happen before we get to the draft anyway. |
| 0:24.6 | So we're going to talk about free agency more in depth over the next couple weeks. |
| 0:28.3 | But rather than kind of shifting our focus to this pool of players, I actually wanted to look |
| 0:33.6 | at free agency through a look back lens instead. I had Derek come on today and we looked at |
| 0:41.3 | the last 10 years of Super Bowl participants, right? So it's 20 teams over a 10 year period. And what I |
| 0:48.6 | wanted to do using this year's Eagles as a sort of reference point is look at what the free agent or if you're |
| 0:55.7 | expanding it a little bit, veteran addition halls looked like for these teams in any given year |
| 1:02.3 | before they went to the Super Bowl. And the reason I wanted to do this is I was just being, |
| 1:06.4 | I was curious as I was thinking about the Eagles about how crucial that influx or injection of veteran talent in a single offseason often is for these teams who are trying to win championships. |
| 1:19.9 | So that's what Derek and I did today. |
| 1:21.5 | We really went through the last decade of teams that played in the Super Bowl and tried to figure out if there were any through lines or |
| 1:27.8 | themes for what their free agency periods looked like and how we can maybe learn some lessons |
| 1:33.9 | for that as we project forward in what teams should be trying to do in free agency. |
| 1:40.2 | So this is fun. |
| 1:41.3 | A little bit of a nostalgia play, some surprising things that we stumbled on to. |
| 1:45.4 | And I think by the end of it, we did land on a couple lessons that are worthwhile as you guys are thinking about how your team can weaponize free agency. |
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