Cincinnati Bengals Among NFL's More Improved Teams In 2026 Free Agency So Far

CINCINNATI — The Bengals made a few additions to the 2026 roster this week and kept their salary cap sheet very clean along the way to leave room for more names to join.

Bryan Cook, Boye Mafe, and Jonathan Allen are real free agency upgrades for Cincinnati, and Kevin Cole visualized that along with every other NFL team's improvement (or lack thereof) for his /Unexpected Points Substack.

Cole used his all-encompassing NFL Plus/Minus metric to set the hierarchy.

Improving This Week

Bengals safety Bryan Cook speaks to the media during a press conference at Paycor Stadium in Cincinnati on Thursday, March 12, 2026. | Albert Cesare/The Enquirer / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

According to Cole, Cincinnati ranks 11th in offseason improvement so far this offseason, trailing the Browns and Jets by a decent margin at the top. They did have three of the eight most impactful boosts to the roster by projected total +/- added among all moves this week in Cook, Mafe, and Allen.

The Colts are falling off more than any other team this offseason, creating a whole new x-axis width for the chart. Meanwhile, the Bengals have done a nice job, but there is still plenty of room to improve the team, especially at linebacker, where an addition needs to happen before April to have the best headspace to draft the top player available in each pick of the opening few rounds.

The mid-tier of free agency still has talent left for Bengals director of player personnel Duke Tobin to comb through.

"Without giving away the keys to the castle, sometimes when teams have heavy turnover in every area of their team, they're looking to make changes, and maybe the changes that they're making aren't great changes, but just change." Tobin said at the 2026 NFL Combine. "Change for change's sake is not something that I'm all about. If I think the guy that we had is still the best guy of these seven available guys, I'm going to go with that still because I feel like he's a better player. Sometimes, when you get heavy turnover around the league, you can find opportunities in guys that are maybe overlooked by their current staff. Normally, the team knows them the best, but there are opportunities when the team doesn't know them any better than you do. So that's maybe one aspect that we look at.

"Other aspects are guys that have been covered up, maybe with better players. Maybe that's the strength of the team that they're on, but it doesn't make them less of a player. It just gives them less of an opportunity to show that they're a player. So that can be an opportunity too, to find a guy that maybe other people are overlooking."

Check out the latest Improvement Index from Cole below:

Daily update to the @Unexpected_Pts 2026 NFL Offseason Improvement Index.

Includes a handful of smaller signings that became official on the NFL transaction list yesterday.

Colts slipping further down, values tightening up near the top between the Browns and Jets pic.twitter.com/P7pvKpnIod
— Kevin Cole (@KevinCole___) March 14, 2026

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