2026 NFL free agency: Big remaining issues for 20 contenders - ESPN

In a perfect world, your favorite NFL team would keep everybody they want on a reasonable salary, add the best players available in free agency and find a sleeper or two on the lower ends of the market. In reality, of course, things rarely go that way.

Most teams might be able to get deals done to keep their essential players around, but the salary cap ensures that even the best-run teams can't pay everyone. Organizations budget a certain amount of money for a player and then have to bow out once things get beyond their expectations. A market that containing, say, five viable young options at a position could dry up in a matter of hours, and the teams that didn't land their preferred choices have to try to find a replacement from whomever is left.

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Free agency is about having a plan, but it's also about adapting to the hand each team has been dealt. And today, having sat through most of the meaningful free agent spending period, I want to help contenders around the NFL do just that. Taking stock of their rosters and where they stand one week into the 2026 league year, I'm identifying each contender's biggest weakness and how they might try to fix it, given what's left in free agency and the habits of the decision-makers involved.

Is there a starting-caliber free agent left on the market? Will these teams instead address their weak positions in the draft? Or are there other reasons to think that a team might wait until later in the summer before making any decisions?

To save myself from having to make playoff predictions in mid-March, I'll define contenders as franchises that made the playoffs in either 2024 or 2025, which leaves us with only… 20 teams. Better get started. (Teams are