Giants, Raiders, Jets among teams in line for turnaround after signings/trades

Player procurement is always best viewed in hindsight because you can’t grade a free agency class without knowing how the pieces fit together on game day. Which is why we want to start this look at turnaround candidates for 2026 by first looking back at 2025. Also, we want to take a victory lap.

We hit the bullseye on our top two turnaround picks a year ago — naming the Bears and the Patriots as the leading candidates — but even we couldn’t have imagined just how dramatic the U-turns would be. Both teams made the playoffs and the Patriots, astonishingly, went from a four-win team to a Super Bowl team. The Jacksonville Jaguars didn’t even make the list, and they went from four wins to 13 and won the AFC South title.

That’s the good news. The bad is that we named five turnaround candidates. The other three — the Bengals, Raiders and Browns — all managed to get worse in 2025, which proves just how inexact a science football forecasting is.

Nevertheless, we’ll try again. Here’s our ranking of the teams primed for a rebound. A few caveats, first. This is not the same as a ranking of how teams performed in free agency. The Rams, for instance, were superb, filling needs with signings and trades. But you can’t have a turnaround from narrowly losing the NFC Championship Game to the eventual Super Bowl champ. And this is also not a playoff prediction. Turnarounds are often steps in rebuilds. Those take time, but they are still worth recognizing.