How much better—or worse—is each AFC team after the first wave of free agency?
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2026
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Most of this year's free agent class is now spoken for, and all 32 teams in the league have made the biggest move they'll make, outside of the draft. So how much better—or worse, as the case may be—is each team now that free agency is mostly behind us? Robert Mays and Derrik Klassen answer that question for the 16 AFC teams on this episode of The Athletic Football Show.
Connect with The Athletic Football Show
YT: https://www.youtube.com/@TAFootballShow
Podcasts: https://podfollow.com/the-athletic-football-show/view
X: https://x.com/TA_FootballShow
IG: https://www.instagram.com/tafootballshow
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tafootballshow
Discord: http://discord.gg/theathleticfootballshow
Buy our merch! http://theathletic.lnk.to/tafsmerch
Call us: 847-448-0701
Email us: athleticfootballshow@gmail.com
Host: Robert Mays
Co-Hosts: Derrik Klassen and Dave Helman
Executive Producer: Michael Beller
Video Producer: Katy Duffy
Audio Producer: Michael Beller
Social Producer: Scott Krinch
Follow Robert on Bluesky: @robertmays.bsky.social
Follow Derrik on Bluesky: @qbklass.bsky.social
Follow Robert on X: @robertmays
Follow Derrik on X: @QBKlass
Theme song: Haunted
Written by Dylan Slocum, Trevor Dietrich, Ruben Duarte, Kyle McAulay, and Meredith VanWoert / Performed by Spanish Love Songs
Courtesy of Pure Noise / By arrangement with Bank Robber Music, LLC
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. |
| 0:05.2 | I'm Robert Mays, taking a step back and doing really one of our first bigger picture looks at all of the moves that have happened in free agency. |
| 0:14.0 | Last year, we did an exercise where, as a lot of the dust had settled, we looked at every team in the league over the course of two shows, |
| 0:21.5 | AFC, NFC, NFC, and asked a pretty simple but important question. Now that the first wave of |
| 0:26.9 | free agency is over, how much better are these teams really? And that can be a complicated question |
| 0:33.6 | with a complicated answer for some of these teams, even the ones that have spent a lot of money. And so to help me sort through that, Derek Kasten joined me to talk about every single |
| 0:43.6 | team today in the AFC, the ones that have spent big, the ones that haven't spent that much, and |
| 0:48.7 | try to figure out how much better are these teams actually now that we're about a week into free agency |
| 0:55.0 | and about two weeks into the bigger moves of the offseason? |
| 0:58.2 | So we're talking about every AFC team today with me and Derek. |
| 1:02.0 | Let's get to that conversation and that question right now. |
| 1:16.7 | All right. We're about a week into NFL free agency with things kicking off last Monday. |
| 1:22.3 | And as a lot of the dust has settled, we wanted to try to start zooming out a little bit and just have some initial responses and big picture thoughts about what some of these free agent halls have looked like. Obviously, the necessary caveat here is, we're not done. There's still plenty |
| 1:32.9 | of players available in free agency. There are plenty of holes still to fill. And so you're going to |
| 1:37.2 | have incomplete grades on what these classes look like for almost every single team. But we did this |
| 1:42.6 | last year and it was a fun exercise and I wanted to run it back again. |
| 1:45.7 | Over the next two days, Derek, |
| 1:47.3 | we're going to look at every single team in the NFL. |
| 1:50.0 | We're doing AFC today, we're doing NFC tomorrow. |
| 1:52.4 | And a week into free agency, we want to ask, |
| 1:55.4 | when you take into account the losses, the gains, |
| 1:59.0 | just the overall net acquisition of players, how much better are these |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Athletic, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Athletic and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.