Aaron Schatz, ESPN Writer 9y

Five offenses built to win now

NFL, Seattle Seahawks, Green Bay Packers, Atlanta Falcons, Indianapolis Colts, Pittsburgh Steelers

You may have read in various places that the 2014 New England Patriots were either the youngest or second-youngest team to ever win a Super Bowl. That number comes from averaging the age of every player on the Patriots' roster, but that methodology doesn't account for the fact that 37-year-old Tom Brady played most of the snaps at quarterback, not 23-year-old Jimmy Garoppolo.

We can do better.

Football Outsiders determines which teams are the oldest and youngest with a metric we call "snap-weighted age," which measures the average age of the players on a team based on which players actually played that season. So, for example, a player with 1,000 snaps counts twice as much as a player with just 500 snaps. For 2014, the oldest team in the league by this method was New Orleans at 27.3 years. And the Patriots were not a particularly young group, ranking as the 10th-oldest (27 years) when we looked at who actually played.

This offseason, for the first time, we decided to create an approximate snap-weighted age estimate for each offense and defense. We analyzed projected starting lineups and created formulas to project the average number of snaps played by lower-round picks based on position. Of course, we can't predict where injuries will force teams to start rookies and other young players. But by looking at where teams added free agents and where they drafted rookies, we can get an idea of which offenses and defenses are building the future and which want to win now.

One more very important note: Getting older/younger doesn't necessarily make a team better or worse. (Older teams do perform slightly better based on Football Outsiders' DVOA metrics, but it's a small correlation: 0.15 on offense and 0.17 on defense.) With that in mind, let's look at the five offenses that are build to win now. (You can find the five offenses that are built with the future in mind here.)

We'll touch on the defenses next week.

All player ages listed below are for 2015, based solely on birth year.


Indianapolis Colts

2014: 26.2 (27th-oldest) / 2015, estimated: 27.6 (10th)

No offense added more age than the Colts this offseason, and it isn't even close. Indy's estimated SWA for next season is 1.45 years older than last season; no other offense is projected to get more than a year older. A couple of contributing factors to the outlier:

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