What did free agency tell us about the state of the NY Giants’ roster?
We’ll know that the Giants have become a good team when they have few free agents.
Bobby Okereke, still a free agent | Icon Sportswire via Getty Images NFL rosters are far from set at this stage of the offseason, but free agent signings have slowed to a trickle, and things probably won’t pick up again until cutdown days to get rosters from 90 to 53 players begin after the final pre-season games. Thus what you see on the New York Giants’ roster now is probably pretty close to the pool of players from which the 53 for the 2026 season will be constructed. Most of the interest in free agency centers on the acquisition of new players, but the disposition of players who became free agents at the end of the 2025 season is interesting in its own right.
It’s something of a Rorschach test for how the team views its own players vs. how other teams view them, and it’s also a pretty good snapshot of how good a team is right now. Below is a chart comparing the Giants’ 2026 free agent situation to that of all of the 2025 season NFL playoff teams based on the Over The Cap free agency tracker: I would like to try to make the case that the patterns in these numbers are a reasonable guide to the state of each team at the moment.
For example: The Giants entered the offseason with a huge number of free agents, more than any of the playoff teams and fewer than only Miami and Washington, two other bad teams last year. The final four teams are just the opposite, having gone into the off-season with many more players already under contract than the Giants. Three of those four teams have remarkably stable rosters.
The Seahawks, Broncos, and Rams have only 1, 4, and 6 free agents still unsigned at the moment, compared to the Giants’ 14, and having only 6, 3, and 6 leave for other teams vs. the Giants’ 11. The Jaguars didn’t make it past Round 1, but they have a similarly stable roster now and only five unsigned free agents.