Forecasting the Positions: Linebackers
Using Approximate Value and ESPN depth charts to project which position groups will be the best in the 2026 season
This is a dim, dark time in the NFL world. We are still a month out from the start of training camp, and the draft was nearly two months ago. Even the release of the NFL schedule has been longer than a month. All of the low-hanging fruit has been picked as far as NFL content goes, and most of the higher-hanging fruit as well. At this point, it is unlikely that there will be any more trades of relevant players or new players picked up that are difference makers.
Nevertheless, the show must go on. NFL content never stops, and neither do we here at KCSN. Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a new series that looks at the current depth chart from ESPN for each NFL team and compares how each position group stacks up against the rest of the NFL. I did this using Pro Football Reference's Approximate Value (AV) metric as a player value measure.
Approximate Value is a metric that basically looks at how many points an offense scored, turns that into a number (total offensive AV), and then splits up the credit for that number between all the players who played on offense. Basically the same for defense, only it’s points allowed instead. It is far more complicated than that, and you can read about it at the link I posted above, but this is a reasonable high-level overview of it.
What I wanted to do was to predict the expected AV for a position group based on the players who are currently on the roster for 2026. While I was working on this exercise, I found there were essentially three categories of players. Rookies are incoming players who have never played before. These players have obviously not had a chance to accrue AV yet. For these players, I created a simple model that looks at the past 10 years of rookie production by draft slot.
For second-year players, I looked at how much AV a player earned in their rookie season along with their draft slot, and then ran a model to project second-year AV based on their rookie AV and draft slot. For example, a rookie taken in the first round who earned 0-1 AV is likely a player who got injured or sat behind a vet for a year. Those players tend to see a jump up to 4.75 AV in their second year. First-round draft picks who earned 2-3 AV their first year see a smaller jump, up to about 5.27 AV. These jumps are significant for first-rounders, but become smaller each later round, until a 7th rounder who earned 0-1 is expected to earn about the same or less.
After the second year, AV tends to settle for most players, with small incremental increases instead of big jumps by year. For 3rd year players, I weighted their rookie year at 25% and their second year at 75% to calculate their expected AV. Everyone after year 3 is a vet. For vets, I averaged their past four-year AV and their past two-year AV. I weighted the two-year AV at 70% and the four-year AV at 30% to calculate their projected AV. That helps to account for injuries or down seasons.