NFL

The 5 NFL Teams That Improved Most in 2016

The Cowboys' offensive turnaround helped them become one of the best teams in the NFL this season. Who else made a massive improvement?

Improvement in the NFL can be subjective.

Sometimes, a better mark in the win-loss column from the prior year can be misleading. Some teams may have shored up glaring weaknesses and made drastic turnarounds in the second half of the season even if they missed the playoffs.

Sometimes, getting young players experience is a net positive from where the team was the year prior.

Really, "improvement" depends a lot on expectations.

But if we strip all that away and look just at on-field performance, we can see which teams actually improved most from last season, from an efficiency standpoint.

To do so, we'll be turning to our nERD metric, which indicates the expected point differential for a team against a league-average opponent on a neutral field. If a team posts a nERD of 3.00, they'd be expected to beat an average team (with a nERD of 0.00) by a field goal at a neutral site.

So, which teams made the biggest jumps in overall efficiency this season?