How are Super Bowl-level NFL rosters built at each position?playAre the Cowboys legit contenders this season? (1:31)Bill BarnwellJul 9, 2026, 06:25 AM ETClose
Bill Barnwell is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com. He analyzes football on and off the field like no one else on the planet, writing about in-season X’s and O’s, offseason transactions and so much more.
He is the host of the Bill Barnwell Show podcast, with episodes released weekly. Barnwell joined ESPN in 2011 as a staff writer at Grantland.
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How do you build an NFL team capable of making it to the Super Bowl? Ask 10 of your friends, and you might get 10 different answers. Ask 10 NFL general managers, and their responses might vary just as significantly.
While there might be a few commonalities here and there, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to building a roster. There are plenty of cliches about how teams need a great defense, a great quarterback, a dominant offensive line or loads of experience to make it to a title game, but it takes only a few seconds to think about clear counter-examples to each of those potential rules or paths forward.
The 2025 Seattle Seahawks, of course, did something that a lot of people (myself included) didn’t think was possible: win a Super Bowl with Sam Darnold as their quarterback. Darnold was excellent during different stretches of the season and played one of his best games as a pro in the critical NFC title game victory over the Rams, but even the well-traveled QB admitted he didn’t play very well in the Super Bowl. The Seahawks fielded a great defense all season, and when Darnold did struggle, Devon Witherspoon & Co. made up for their quarterback.
The New England Patriots, who came up just short in the Super Bowl, might be an even bigger outlier of a roster build. One year removed from being one of the worst teams in the league, the Pats accelerated their development through a massive free agent spending spree. And at the same time, they benefited from the same second-year leap at quarterback that we’ve seen drive success for teams such as the Kansas City Chiefs with Patrick Mahomes, the Baltimore Ravens with Lamar Jackson and the Philadelphia Eagles with Carson Wentz, with the latter winning the title even after their franchise quarterback was injured.
Let’s take a big-picture look at how NFL teams build Super Bowl winners. The calculus of NFL roster building evolved in 2011, when the league and its players landed on a new collective bargaining agreement that locked rookie salaries in place and established clear timelines to free agency. Teams have gotten younger as a result, with general managers leaning in to the cost control afforded by draft talent. The average snap-weighted age for NFL teams in 2010 on a given play was 27.7 years old. In 2024, that figure had fallen by more than a half-year to 27.1 years old.
Since that 2011 season, we’ve witnessed 30 teams compete for 15 Lombardi Trophies. While that’s not a huge sample, it gives us a starting point to evaluate what they’ve done and how to win a conference title in the modern NFL. Can teams get away from the draft? Do they need to stuff the roster with first-round picks? Let’s go position by position to answer some of those questions today.
For each of those 30 teams, I tracked 20 players and their paths to making the roster. On offense, I looked at quarterback, running back, the top two wide receivers, tight end and each of the five starting spots on the offensive line. On defense, it was the top two edge rushers, defensive tackles, linebackers, cornerbacks and safeties. Teams need 53 players to compete for a championship, but most of their resources are going to be devoted to those top 20 players.
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I also tried to toe the line between how a roster was constructed during the offseason and how it played out in reality during the season. Every general manager would love to have their team stay healthy and play as they planned all season, but the NFL doesn’t work that way. If a player was on the field for the majority of the season, I considered him to be the team’s primary option for the purposes of this piece. For example, while Wentz tore an ACL and Nick Foles was under center for the 2017 Eagles in the Super Bowl, Wentz played 13 of Philadelphia’s 19 games that season and was clearly the driving force behind how the Eagles built their QB room. I treated Wentz as the quarterback of that team.
On the other hand, while the Seahawks sent a first-round pick to the Vikings for Percy Harvin and signed the mercurial wideout to a significant contract before the 2013 season, he played one regular-season game and caught a total of five passes all year because of injuries. Yes, he returned a kickoff for a touchdown in the Super Bowl, but the Seahawks didn’t make it to the big game that season because of Harvin’s contributions to the roster. So instead, I considered Golden Tate and Doug Baldwin to be the primary wide receivers for that team, even though Harvin and fellow former Vikings wideout Sidney Rice (who himself missed half the season) were the two highest-paid players at the position.
Compare that to someone such as Von Miller during his half-season with the Rams. Miller was acquired in a midseason deal with the Broncos, but the Rams gave up a pair of draft picks to acquire the veteran, and he played a huge role in the playoffs as they went on to win the Super Bowl. Even though Miller wasn’t the Week 1 starter on the edge, it seems right to consider him as a key edge rusher for that season’s Rams.
I noted whether a player was acquired through the draft, through free agency, as an undrafted free agent, via a trade or by some other path (such as the franchise tag or off waivers). I considered players who were acquired via a trade of draft picks as a product of where they landed in the draft as opposed to being acquired via trade (so Mahomes would be considered a draft pick as opposed to a trade return). I also split those sections into groups by the capital used to acquire them, so free agents were either premium, middle-class or low-end additions, adjusted for position. Draft picks were either high first-rounders (top-10 picks), mid first-rounders (picks 11-20), late first-rounders (21-32), Day 2 picks (Rounds 2-3) or Day 3 selections (Rounds 4-7). And I split trades into big, medium and small deals.
Let’s run position by position, and then we’ll land on some big-picture points at the end.
Jump to:
QB | RB | WR | TE | OL
Edge | DT | LB | CB | S
Big takeaways on roster building
Quarterback
Draft: 24 of 30 players (12 high first-round picks, one mid first-round pick, five Day 2 picks, six Day 3 picks)
Trade: 2 (one big, one medium)
Free agency: 4 (three premium, one middle class)
Quarterback illuminates both the strengths and weaknesses of evaluating these Super Bowl teams. There’s one very obvious and important piece of information: If a team wants to make it to the Super Bowl, it better be comfortable drafting and developing a QB. Darnold won a Super Bowl last season as the lone middle-class quarterback of the 30, but 24 of the other 29 prior candidates were homegrown talents.
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The exceptions might qualify as unique cases, too. The free agents were legends at the ends of their careers. Tom Brady was 43 years old and coming off a disappointing season with the Patriots when he signed with the Buccaneers. Peyton Manning, who made two trips with the Broncos, was 36 years old when he hit free agency after missing the entire prior season because of a neck injury. The trade acquisitions were Matthew Stafford, who won a title with the Rams, and Jimmy Garoppolo, who came up short with the 49ers.
And then, on the other hand, it’s a bit of a shock that 11 of the 24 quarterback seasons came from players who weren’t drafted in the first round, including six from Day 3. It’s possible to find QB talent in unexpected places, but it’s worth pointing out that five of those six Super Bowl appearances were made by Brady during his time with the Patriots. The sixth was Brock Purdy. Four of the five Day 2 appearances were from Russell Wilson and Jalen Hurts, with Colin Kaepernick rounding out the group.
Could you draw the conclusion that it’s possible to win the Super Bowl without a quarterback drafted at the very top of the first round? Absolutely. If teams can find a guy in the middle or late rounds like Brady, Wilson or Hurts, they are going to be in great shape. It might also be worth taking that swing on a legendary signal-caller at the end of his career, although moves for the likes of Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers haven’t resulted in title runs for other teams.
Running back
Draft: 18 of 30 players (one high first-round pick, two mid first-round picks, two late first-round picks, six Day 2 picks, six Day 3 picks, one UDFA)
Trade: 4 (one big, two medium, one small)
Free agency: 8 (one premium, seven low end)
There’s unsurprisingly a much wider range of players here at running back, where the league has been able to find talent in a wider range of places and more willing to move on from players who were performing at a high level.
Team philosophies impact things here, as some offenses are obviously more heavily built around their backs than others. Consider the Patriots, for example, who typically combined a receiving back such as Kevin Faulk or James White with an unheralded bigger back on early downs. While they won a title with Corey Dillon as a lead back earlier in the Brady era, their primary backs during their Super Bowl runs in the era we’re analyzing included BenJarvus Green-Ellis, Dion Lewis and LeGarrette Blount, all of whom were signed on modest deals. The exception was Sony Michel, drafted just before Nick Chubb at the end of the first round.
But you could also argue that teams that have taken running backs early in the draft have also been able to turn that into a title. Eleven of the 30 backs here were drafted by teams in one of the top two rounds and made it to the title game before leaving, including Michel. And while there are six Day 3 backs who have been in the lead role on these teams, three of those picks were fourth-round selections. The only back taken after the fourth round was Isiah Pacheco, who was doing it as part of one of the league’s most pass-happy offenses. It might not be quite as easy to just plug and play those Day 3 picks as it was during the heyday of the Mike Shanahan outside zone run games, which is why we’ve seen teams invest more in the position.
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Jeremy Fowler’s takeaways from the top-10 NFL RBs
Lead wide receiver
Draft: 20 (four high first-round picks, six late first-round picks, three Day 2 picks, five Day 3 picks, two UDFAs)
Trade: 6 (four big, two medium)
Free agency: 4 (one premium, one middle class, two low-end)
Second wide receiver
Draft: 12 (one high first-round pick, one mid first-round pick, six Day 2 picks, two Day 3 picks, two UDFAs)
I’ve split the wide receivers into two groups to illuminate the differences between how teams prioritize them. There are a few Super Bowl teams with a pair of high-end wideouts — the Eagles with A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith, and the Bengals with Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins come to mind — but the majority of teams are investing heavily in one wideout and going with a much more frugal or easy-to-acquire option as their No. 2.
In looking at each team’s top wideout, 15 of 30 were acquired by using what I’d characterize as a significant asset. They either drafted that wide receiver in the first round, made a significant trade that involved a premium player or a first-round pick worth of value, or signed that player to a big deal in free agency. (The only example of the latter is Stefon Diggs, who was gone after one season in New England.) Just four of the 30 players fit that criteria for those teams’ No. 2 receiver.
Flip it, and just nine of 30 lead wideouts were acquired using a Day 3 pick, a low-cost trade or a relatively modest free agent deal. Fifteen of 30 secondary wideouts were acquired by the same means. It has been tempting in the era of quarterbacks on cheap contracts to surround the signal-caller with as many superstars as possible, and more talent is better than less talent, but most teams have been able to make it work with one premium wideout and one acquired at a much more reasonable cost. Even Higgins, remember, was a second-round pick on a very reasonable contract when the Bengals made it to the Super Bowl, which allowed Cincinnati’s front office to devote more money to the defense.
Tight end
Draft: 23 (one high first-round pick, 13 Day 2 picks, nine Day 3 picks)
Trade: 3 (one medium, two small)
Free agency: 4 (four middle class)
Were you expecting tight end to be one of the most heavily drafted and developed positions for Super Bowl teams? I wasn’t. To be fair, tight ends such as Travis Kelce and Rob Gronkowski feature on multiple Super Bowl teams throughout this era; those two might have an outsized impact on how we view the position.
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I suspect the reasoning here has to do with the finances of the position and how tight end salaries have grown at a much slower rate than those of wide receivers over the past 15 years. If a team has a tight end it likes, it’s rare to see it lose that player to free agency for financial reasons. The great tight ends who changed teams were typically either traded at the end of their careers (Gronkowski and Tony Gonzalez come to mind) or moved because their prior team didn’t value them appropriately (Greg Olsen). Jimmy Graham was one of the few to be traded in the prime of his career in a deal that the Saints ended up winning.
Left tackle
Draft: 19 (seven high first-round picks, three mid first-round picks, three late first-round picks, three Day 2 picks, three Day 3 picks)
Trade: 3 (two big, one small)
Free agency: 7 (one premium, three middle class, three low end)
Other: 1 (one waiver wire acquisition)
The league places a financial premium on left tackles over right tackles, so I’ll keep them separate here. It has certainly seemed like the dynasties or most consistent situations of the past few decades have had stable left tackle situations. The Patriots relied on Matt Light and Nate Solder for nearly two decades. After relying on Tra Thomas and Jason Peters during his time in Philadelphia, Andy Reid’s first pick in Kansas City was left tackle Eric Fisher, who was in place for the next nine seasons. Sean McVay signed Andrew Whitworth in his first offseason with the Rams, and after Whitworth retired, the Rams dealt with Joseph Noteboom for a year before turning to Alaric Jackson, who has been there since. Teams don’t want to turn over their left tackles very often.
In recent years, though, the Chiefs have been the exception to that rule, having cycled through Orlando Brown Jr., Donovan Smith and a committee at left tackle in 2024. And while I’ve always been of the perception that teams have needed to find that left tackle in the draft, the Rams made it to two Super Bowls with Whitworth, while the 49ers made it to one with Trent Williams, who was acquired via trade and then re-signed in free agency.
Teams have also been able to win with backups playing most or all of the season. The one waiver-wire acquisition was 2013 Broncos tackle Chris Clark, who filled in while starter Ryan Clady missed all but two games because of a Lisfranc injury. Trent Brown, originally acquired to be a swing tackle or potential starter on the right side for the Patriots, was the full-season starter in 2018 after first-round pick Isaiah Wynn tore an Achilles in camp.
Disastrous tackle play can cost a team the Super Bowl, as we’ve seen in each of the past two title games. But the right backup can still hold his own on a trip to the big game.
Right tackleDraft: 20 (four high first-round picks, three mid first-round picks, eight Day 2 picks, four Day 3 picks, one UDFA)Free agency: 9 (three premium, four middle class, two low end)Other: 1 (one practice-squad acquisition)Right tackle is still a medium-priority position for Super Bowl teams, and it was a surprise to see that more left tackles had joined their teams from another organization (11) than right tackles (10). It’s a little easier to find cost-effective solutions at right tackle later in the draft or in the middle class of free agency. We’ve also seen teams willing to move left tackles down the offensive line spectrum to what’s perceived to be a less-difficult pass blocking position on the right side, something that might happen to Patriots tackle Will Campbell in the years to come.
Guard
Draft: 39 (two mid first-round picks, three late first-round picks, 15 Day 2 picks, 14 Day 3 picks, five UDFAs)
Given that there is not a huge disparity between left guards and right guards, I’ll lump them together. And there’s a clear drop-off between tackle and interior linemen. Just 11 of 60 starters at guard were acquired via a first-round pick or as a big-money addition in free agency. Nearly half were acquired on Day 3 of the draft, as undrafted free agents, via the waiver wire or on cheap deals in free agency.
Will that change? One of the major shifts in the league over this 15-year time frame has been the outflow of money at running back, which then then went primarily toward wide receivers and interior linemen. We’ve seen even mediocre guards get paid as much as or more than accomplished, successful running backs over the past few free agencies. Could that trend continue? Or will we see the league’s best teams take more shots on low-cost guards and hope to land difference-makers in the draft?
Center
Draft: 19 (seven Day 2 picks, five Day 3 picks, 7 UDFAs)
Free agency: 9 (three premium, one middle-class, five low-end)
Other: 2 (two waiver-wire acquisitions)
Well, if you’re a Raiders fan, let yourself get excited about what the future looks like with Tyler Linderbaum at the pivot. No team with a first-round pick it drafted at center has made it to the Super Bowl over the past 15 years. But three Super Bowl teams have relied on big-money additions there: the Bucs with Ryan Jensen, the Falcons with Alex Mack and the 49ers with Weston Richburg (who suffered what ended up being a career-ending injury by the time the game came around).
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Otherwise, this has been a relatively modest position, as teams have comfortably relied on later draft picks and lower-cost additions. Organizations have been able to land true superstars outside of the first round, with Jason Kelce (sixth-round pick for the Eagles) and Creed Humphrey (late second-round pick for the Chiefs) as notable examples. Linderbaum’s deal is an outlier by any stretch of the imagination, but the Raiders will hope he’s an exception to the rule as they try to build a contender around quarterback Fernando Mendoza.
Lead edge rusher
Draft: 18 (seven high first-round picks, two mid first-round pick, four late first-round picks, one Day 2 pick, four Day 3 picks)
Trade: 5 (two big, three medium)
Free agency: 7 (one premium, five middle class, one low end)
Second edge rusher
Draft: 11 (one mid first-round pick, one late first-round pick, four Day 2 picks, four Day 3 picks, one UDFA)
Other: 2 (one franchise tag, one waiver-wire acquisition)
Teams pay a premium for elite production on the edge, and as was the case at wide receiver, we can see a real disparity between how teams acquire their top edge rusher versus their second-best option. Sixteen of 30 primary edge rushers were acquired via a first-round pick, a significant trade or free agency. Just five were added on Day 3 of the draft (none after Round 4) or with a low-cost move on the open market.
With the second edge rusher, meanwhile, the numbers are flipped. Only five were picked up with a high-value asset, and 15 were added via one of the low-cost options I mentioned earlier. Like wide receiver, it’s always better to have two stars on the edge. In practice, great teams typically have one player added with a premium asset and a second from a much more affordable path.
I will note that edge rusher might be the position where teams do spend a premium to have more than two viable options. The 2011 Giants, for example, could call on Justin Tuck, Osi Umenyiora and Jason Pierre-Paul on the edge. The 2024 Eagles had draft picks Nolan Smith Jr. and Josh Sweat as their primary edge options, but their most expensive pass rusher was free agent Bryce Huff, who was benched by the time the Super Bowl rolled around.
And while there are reasonable concerns that great teams can’t land impact edge defenders in free agency, that threat isn’t necessarily borne out by the evidence here. The Seahawks and Patriots were able to build their starting edge rush duo in 2025 from free agency. Jonathan Greenard and Danielle Hunter have starred for their teams after signing in 2024. Sweat and Chase Young had double-digit sacks last season. Teams would always love to land edge rushers in the draft without needing to resort to trades or free agency, but the latter is more of a plausible path to production than it might seem, which might discourage front offices from paying over the odds on the trade market for help.
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Jeremy Fowler’s takeaways from the top 10 NFL pass rushers
Lead defensive tackle
Draft: 24 (two high first-round picks, seven mid first-round picks, five late first-round picks, eight Day 2 picks, two Day 3 picks)
Trade: 2 (one medium, one small)
Free agency: 4 (two premium, one middle class, one low end)
Second defensive tackle
Draft: 19 (five mid first-round picks, one late first-round pick, seven Day 2 picks, four Day 3 picks, 2 UDFAs)
Trade: 1 (one small)
Free agency: 10 (one premium, four middle class, five low end)
If there is a position that’s truly difficult to find in free agency or even via trade, though, it’s adding a high-end defensive tackle. Milton Williams turned out to be one of the few exceptions for the Patriots a year ago, but it’s really difficult to find a top defensive tackle outside of the first two rounds of the draft. In fact, 21 of the 30 lead D-tackles on these teams were taken across the first two rounds of the draft, five more than the second-highest position (quarterback).
And like wide receiver and edge rusher, there’s a pretty significant drop-off in how teams value their second defensive tackle versus their more significant starter. In this case, there might be a difference in styles. Defensive tackles typically need to be excellent pass rushers to justify first-round picks or earn significant contracts, but teams usually prefer to mix a penetrating tackle with freedom to get after the quarterback alongside more of a run-plugging, two-gap nose option. Those players are valuable in their own right, but they’re typically drafted later, get paid less and are more likely to hit the market.
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Jeremy Fowler’s takeaways from the top 10 NFL DTs
Off-ball linebacker
Draft: 42 (three high first-round picks, two mid first-round picks, five late first-round picks, 20 Day 2 picks, seven Day 3 picks, five UDFAs)
Trade: 4 (one medium, three small)
Free agency: 10 (one premium, three middle class, six low end)
Other: 4 (four waiver-wire acquisitions)
While both the Seahawks (Drake Thomas) and Patriots (Christian Elliss) played waiver-wire acquisitions at linebacker through their runs to last season’s Super Bowl, this is another position where teams are more heavily built through the draft than I might have expected. We’ve seen organizations that don’t particularly value the position be willing to go the low-cost route, but that has typically been through middle-round selections as opposed to free agent signings, with Zack Baun as a significant recent exception.
There are more first-rounders in the mix than I would have guessed, too. The Panthers started two with Luke Kuechly and Thomas Davis. The Bucs had Devin White. The Patriots started Dont’a Hightower throughout their runs to the Super Bowl in the second half of the Brady era. Even given the franchise tag conflict with off-ball linebackers being compared to edge-rushing linebackers (which limits teams’ ability to sign players to extensions), we’re still seeing a lot of homegrown options in Super Bowls.
Cornerback
Draft: 29 (one high first-round pick, two mid first-round picks, six late first-round picks, six Day 2 picks, 11 Day 3 picks, three UDFAs)
Trade: 10 (two big, four medium, four small)
Free agency: 19 (six premium, seven middle-class, six low-end)
Other: 2 (two waiver-wire acquisitions)
General managers have been able to find useful starters at cornerback in free agency before their runs to the Super Bowl. Just under half of the 60 starters from this grouping are homegrown talents. And while that’s tied with edge rusher for the fewest, there’s a significant disparity between primary edge rusher (typically a homegrown player) versus secondary (way more often a trade or free agent acquisition). There’s no such gap at cornerback, where CB1s and CB2s are about as likely to be acquired as they are to be homegrown.
That can include high-end free agents, such as Stephon Gilmore and Darrelle Revis, or trade acquisitions, such as Jalen Ramsey and Darius Slay Jr. Teams are unsurprisingly more likely to spend a first-round pick on their top cornerback (eight) than they are on their second corner (one). But we’ve seen teams such as the Patriots and Chiefs pursue drastically different paths toward cornerback help and succeed while doing so.
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Jeremy Fowler’s takeaways from the top 10 NFL CBs
Safety
Draft: 32 (three mid first-round picks, seven late first-round picks, 13 Day 2 picks, seven Day 3 picks, two UDFAs)
Other: 2 (one franchise tag, one waiver-wire acquisition)
Like cornerback, there isn’t a significant split between safety spots in terms of how often teams are going with homegrown talent and imported options. And also like cornerback, there’s a huge expense inequality in how much teams are willing to commit to their top safety versus their lesser starter. Teams used 10 first-round picks on safeties, but all of those were on lead starters. Just one safety drafted on Day 3 was his team’s top option (then-49ers star Talanoa Hufanga, who was injured by Super Bowl time), but eight secondary safeties were Day 3 picks.
There’s a level of obviousness here: Teams are typically going to pay more for their best option than they do to acquire their second-best player at the same position. But across wide receiver, offensive tackle, edge rusher, defensive tackle, cornerback and safety, there are dramatic, significant gaps between what a team pays to acquire its top option and its second-best player at the same position. And while fans might worry about that hole in the lineup or clamor for that final piece of the puzzle to be filled, the best franchises are usually able to get by with one big-time investment and one much cheaper option at the same position.
What did we learn?
Having gone position by position, let me finish up by drawing some team-specific conclusions and some big-picture thoughts:
1. The 2025 season was very weird. As I mentioned in the introduction, the Patriots and Seahawks were built in ways that I’m not sure other teams have tried or will try to emulate. The Seahawks signed a relatively unheralded quarterback and won a Super Bowl, something we haven’t really seen for a full season since some great defenses of the early aughts helped Brad Johnson and Trent Dilfer to titles.
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The Patriots found 10 of their 20 starters from this analysis in free agency, tying them with the 2015 Broncos for the most of any team over the past 15 seasons. Eight of those 10 starters had been signed during the prior offseason, which is likely a record for free agent additions who immediately helped their team advance to the Super Bowl. We’ve seen teams such as the 2015 Jets and 2024 Commanders make dramatic single-season leaps forward after massive free agent upgrades, but they weren’t able to parlay those jumps into Super Bowls or sustained success. We’ll see if the Patriots — who added Romeo Doubs, Alijah Vera-Tucker, Dre’Mont Jones and Kevin Byard in free agency this offseason — can return to the title game in 2026.
2. Drafting and developing is essential. It’s a common trope, of course, but every team builds a significant portion of its core with homegrown talent. Every one of our 30 teams over these 15 years drafted at least nine of their 20 starters or signed them as undrafted free agents. A handful of teams — most recently the 2024 Chiefs — had as many 15 homegrown starters on their runs to the Super Bowl. The average was 12.2 starters, or 61% of the key players on the roster.
For whatever chatter there might be about draft picks being worthless because you can’t guarantee what kind of players you’ll land, the ability to get cost-controlled talent and avoid needing to use free agency more than pays off for any uncertainty. The draft provides a path to players at positions where stars hardly ever come available in free agency, including quarterback, lead wide receiver and pass-rushing defensive tackle. And when teams get a difference-maker at a position such as tight end or interior offensive line, it’s not onerous to keep that player for a decade.
The average team in our sample started four first-round picks, four Day 2 picks, three Day 3 picks and one undrafted free agent. We focus on the first round and the big free agent additions, of course, but what teams do on Days 2-3 of the draft can play a critical role. Landing a useful starter for peanuts saves a team from having to pay a premium to sign a veteran free agent. Neither is a guarantee to succeed, but when a middle-round pick fails to play well or can’t stay healthy, it’s a small loss. When a big-name free agent doesn’t live up to expectations, teams lose tens of millions of dollars in opportunity cost.
3. Yes, the Rams are outliers (but not as much as you might think). I can hear you talking about the Rams and their cavalier attitude toward draft picks, especially after general manager Les Snead traded several picks to the Browns to bring in Myles Garrett. And it’s certainly true that the Rams are more than willing to trade away picks they believe will land late in the first round if they can add superstars or young, cost-controlled difference-makers with NFL experience.
As you might suspect, the 2018 and 2021 Rams are two of the teams that fielded only nine drafted-and-developed starters on their runs to the Super Bowl, tying for the lowest mark. And the 2021 Rams lined up with only one first-round pick among their 20 starters, which stood alone for the lowest figure of any team from our 30-squad sample. (The other 29 teams had an average of four first-round picks in their lineups.)
Of course, that first-rounder was Aaron Donald, and he was the best player on the defense as the Rams won the Super Bowl. On offense, while Matthew Stafford played a key role, the Offensive Player of the Year was Cooper Kupp, who was a third-round pick in Sean McVay’s first draft. And if we had done this exercise for the 2025 Rams, 13 of the Rams’ 20 starters would have been players the team either drafted or acquired as undrafted free agents.
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4. Each team builds through only a handful of high-profile moves. Let’s split transactions into two groups, as I’ve been doing here and there throughout the column. On the expensive end, let’s consider top-10 draft picks, high-profile trades and high-end free agents. On the low end, let’s take Day 3 picks, undrafted free agents and low-cost free agents.
The average team from our 30-roster group has just three of those ultra-expensive players among its 20-person core. The Seahawks had two in left tackle Charles Cross and cornerback Devon Witherspoon. The Patriots, by virtue of their spending spree, had five. That’s one of the higher marks; consider that the 2016 Patriots didn’t have a single player who qualified for this group.
On the other hand, those same teams started an average of 6.5 players from the low-cost group. For all the attention we understandably pay to a team’s top players, even in an era with cost-controlled first-round picks, every Super Bowl squad needs to land a handful of players who can hold their own without being significant acquisitions. That can include Day 3 picks who turn into stars (such as Brady, Richard Sherman or Trey Smith) or low-cost free agents who make immediate impacts (such as Zack Baun or Bashaud Breeland). But you just can’t build a team with 20 highly drafted and/or highly paid stars in starting roles.
Teams need to hit on their draft picks, of course, and huge investments in players who don’t live up to expectations can lead to disastrous results. But we’ve seen Super Bowl winners overcome those mistakes. The Seahawks got virtually nothing out of Percy Harvin and won the Super Bowl. The Eagles’ biggest investment during the 2024 offseason was Bryce Huff, who was a healthy scratch as they won the Lombardi Trophy. Peyton Manning was benched for Brock Osweiler during the 2015 season before getting his job back and game-managing his way to a second title.
There’s no right way to build a winner, and there’s no simple blueprint borne out by these 30 teams that represents a radical new strategy. What they might do instead is hint at some general best practices. If you can get one star at wide receiver, defensive tackle, edge rusher or cornerback, you can probably get by with a low-profile option as the second-best player at the position. If you’re going to leave any position to the open market, look for help in the secondary. Oh, and if you can land a quarterback who will take you to the Super Bowl four or five times in a decade like Brady or Mahomes, well, make sure you do that. Because having a generational talent at QB means you can build your team just about any way you want and win most of the time.
