Hogs Haven
And how might that change in 2025?
For five of the six past offseasons, I’ve done analyses looking at the Washington players who provided the best value in the prior seasons. I was so deflated after last year, I needed a breather. Reinvigorated now, I’ve decided to dust off the exercise again.
This is a re-run of those prior exercises with the same rules of the road. Despite its shortcomings, “performance” will be based on Pro Football Reference’s “approximate value (AV),” which is one of the few broadly available tools to try to quantify player performance from year to year.
A description from the PFR site is below:
“Essentially, AV is a substitute for --- and a significant improvement upon, in my opinion --- metrics like ‘number of seasons as a starter’ or ‘number of times making the Pro Bowl’ or the like. You should think of it as being essentially like those two metrics, but with interpolation in between. That is, ‘number of seasons as a starter’ is a reasonable starting point if you’re trying to measure, say, how good a particular draft class is, or what kind of player you can expect to get with the #13 pick in the draft. But obviously some starters are better than others. Starters on good teams are, as a group, better than starters on bad teams. Starting WRs who had lots of receiving yards are, as a group, better than starting WRs who did not have many receiving yards. Starters who made the pro bowl are, as a group, better than starters who didn’t, and so on. And non-starters aren’t worthless, so they get some points too.”
For 2024 salaries, I am using information from Over the Cap. For the purposes of this article, I am using “cap hit” interchangeably with “salary.” Throughout the rest of this article, “value” will be calculated as “cap hit($)/AV.” Players with an AV below 4 were generally eliminated from this exercise unless there was some specific reason to include them.
Washington’s 2024 roster was an interesting one, with lots of young players and significant number of older, seasoned vets on short contracts. This category - comprised of individuals with an AV above 4 and a value below $400,000 - was densely populated as a result.
Ten players fell into this category, with six on their rookie deals and four on very reasonably priced vet contracts. The top player on the list was - by a wide margin - rookie Brandon Coleman, who posted an AV of 8 and a value of around $137,000/AV. Vet wide receiver Olamide Zaccheaus had a sneaky good season as well (AV 6), posting the second-best value on the team at $192,000/AV.
Other vets in this category included WR Noah Brown ($242,000/AV), LB Frankie Luvu ($297,000/AV), and LG Nick Allegretti ($330,000/AV). Luvu’s salary jumps significantly in 2025, with Allegretti’s increasing substantially in 2026.
In addition to Coleman, three more rookies from this year’s...
