NFL: Top positional need for all 32 teams
By Robby Sabo
As we now come down the stretch of the general manager offseason race, the top positional need for all 32 NFL teams have become evident.
Isn’t fascinating how Roger Goodell and his henchmen have gotten us so hooked?
Six months out of the year we salivate during our normal workweek just for a chance to watch any two NFL teams try to destroy each other in between the sidelines. Then, after Sunday comes and goes and we realize we’ve watched 10 straight hours of football, we still feel that immense hunger for more.
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Monday night tries to fulfill our cravings but fails miserably.
Now, with information spewing across the web on a second by second basis, the offseason has quickly made us just as anxious as those workweeks from August to January.
Quite frankly though, NFL general managers laugh at our anxiousness – for they have real football responsibilities. Deciding which depth chart hole to plug first is a risky proposition in the league that plays for pay.
Just as fans get acclimated to the in-season routine of their favorite team’s weekly schedule, they’ve also now become familiar with the different phases all 32 front offices face after Super Bowl Sunday comes to its usually exciting conclusion.
I’ve come to call it the General Manager Triple Crown.
- First comes the garbage cleaning.
General managers and vice presidents alike assess the cap and start piling up the free agent pool of veteran cap casualties. They cut these over-the-hill players in effort to clear the access salary cap room needed for the upcoming free agency period.
Weighing Paragraph 5 (bonus and incentive money) against annual salary is the basic premise. The do this while having a keen forecast on what’s available in the impending free agency and draft periods.
Franchise tags, transition tags and restricted free agency all needs to be decided upon here as well.
At this point a quarter or third of the roster is generally wiped out.
- Then it’s time to start bidding.
Free agency is used to start plugging away at the most critical of positional needs (salary cap situation overruling everything of course).
The main point of free agency is to assure some assemblance of balance across the depth chart for the upcoming season.
- Finally, and most importantly, comes the NFL Draft.
It is the lifeblood of every organization. Because this is a young man’s game, instant contributors will be found anywhere from the top pick to Mr. Irrelevant.
The draft is always that final piece of the puzzle before we can finally start looking at complete rosters for the upcoming season.
At this point, where we currently sit in late March, is when personnel decision makers really execute the franchise’s overall preference between positional need and top value. It is the last chance general managers have to add key components that’ll round out the depth chart prior to OTA’s.
While there’s no question free agency did a lot to smooth out many rough edges surrounding depth charts, each of the 32 NFL organizations still have that one glaring positional need.
Today we will look at these needs.
We will travel through time by division – the normal “newspaper” style going in reverse order of standings, starting with the AFC East and ending with the NFC West.
Here is the top positional need for each of the 32 NFL teams:
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