Retaining starters and free agent activity: Part 2

The first week of free agency is drawing to a close and there has been no shortage of big stories, ranging from the Elvis Dumervil fax mystery to the Percy Harvin and Anquan Boldin trades. DRAFTMETRICS self-assigned role in the reporting of offseason personnel activity is to track the movement, or the lack thereof, of the players who started 2012 NFL games.

DRAFTMETRICS will periodically update its reporting to reflect the most recent personnel activities. As of early Sunday evening, the status of the players who started the 11,264 NFL games in 2012 is summarized as follows:

These numbers will change, of course, as more personnel transactions occur.

So far, players who started about 8% of all 2012 games have been signed by new teams. There are still players accounting for about 17% of 2012 starts available on the open market. Some of those will be resigned by their 2012 team, some will move on to new teams and some will find there is no longer a market for their services. Future updates will capture activity related to those remaining players.

As part of its analysis DRAFTMETRICS identifies the teams that figure to be the most experienced, in terms of 2012 games started, headed into the 2013 season. The following page shows the detail by team. This table shows the current rankings, in order of 2012 games started by players under contract, of each NFL team. Bear in mind that each team will have 352 starts per season.

Summary of Off-Season Team Building Activities by Team

All Information Represents 2012 Starts

March 18, 2013 Update



(1) Represents Starters Retained plus 2012 Games Started by Acquired Players

Tony is the founder of DRAFTMETRICS.COM can be e-mailed at draftmetrics@gmail.com and followed on Twitter @draftmetrics