Continuity vs. turnover on NFC East rosters and why it matters

About ten years ago, Jerry Jones explained that roster turnover every year is about 30%.

”We have about a 30 percent turnover every year. What is the core? Who is the core? That’s a part of what we’ll be doing.“

As the NFL slows down to a crawl between final OTAs and the start of camp, there’s not going to be much roster activity over the next few weeks. Which makes this a good time to look at how much raw playing time from last season each NFC East team will have to replace in 2026, and how close Jerry came to predicting that number.

And the way we’ll do that is to look at the total snaps played by each player on offense, defense, and special teams for each NFC East team, and then look at the percentage of snaps from 2025 remaining on the 2026 roster. Here are two examples to illustrate the approach:

• In 2025, the Cowboys offensive line played 5,938 combined snaps on offense. Brock Hoffman (474 snaps) and Hakeem Adenji (76) are the only players not returning in 2026. The returning linemen combined for combined for 5,388 snaps in 2025, so the Cowboys are returning 91% of their offensive line snaps in 2026.
• Very different story at linebacker, where the Cowboys are only returning 967 of 2,373 snaps (41%).
• The Eagles had six defensive tackles combine for 2,520 snaps last year. Pending whatever happens with Jalen Carter, all six players are still with the team, so the Eagles are returning 100% of their DL snaps.

Here’s the percentage of returning snaps for each team, broken down by unit:

body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table { border: 1px solid #000 !important; border-collapse: collapse !important; } body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th { padding: 2px 6px !important; } Percentage of 2025 Snaps Remaining on RosterTeamOffenseDefenseSpecial TeamsTotalDallas92%54%75%74%New York71%58%58%64%Philadelphia74%73%71%73%Washington71%61%77%68%**TOTAL****75%****61%****70%**69%Source: ProFootballReference.com, Team Websites per July 1st, 2026Most turnover

The Cowboys moved on from almost half of all their defensive snaps, but because of the continuity on offense, the total number across all three units of 74% doesn’t look overly dramatic.

On defense, the 2026 Cowboys will look quite a bit different from last year’s iteration of the team, shedding 90 of 187 starts or 46% of all snaps. But replacing so many players in one offseason is not an easy thing to do.

Which is why the mass hiring of new assistant coaches is a much bigger deal than many think: their success will be measured by their ability to get all the new players up to speed and playing productively, and that was something the Cowboys felt the old staff was most definitely not up to.

The Giants lost the most snaps overall, which is probably par for the course for a 4-10 team. Roster change can be good for teams looking to dramatically upgrade, but there’s also something to be said for continuity.

Most continuity

Somewhat surprisingly, the Cowboys return...