In the younger, cheaper NFL, Super Bowl champs get cut, too

The NFL’s inexorable trend of going younger and cheaper does not bypass the best teams in the league. In fact, it may help them stay as good as they are.

An Associated Press analysis of Super Bowl champions over the past seven years revealed that title teams shed an average of 20.4 players off their 53-man rosters from the Super Bowl to Week 1 of the next season. That’s 38.5 percent.

And no team does it with quite the high-profile effectiveness as the Patriots, who have collected five Super Bowl titles since 2002, and will be going for No. 6 on Sunday against the Rams.

New England’s five Super Bowl champions turned over an average of 19.2 players the season after they won their titles. The season after their 2015 win over the Seahawks, they brought in 24 new players — the biggest number among all the teams surveyed in this analysis