NFL Draft Evaluations
One part of American sports I really enjoy, is the strategizing that goes into building a roster, with the most exciting and crucial moment being how a team executes during the draft. Although I follow basketball more closely than football these days, the NFL draft is far more interesting to me than its NBA counterpart for a couple of reasons.
Positional Importance
A football team contains way more positional variety than a basketball team. This leads to the complication of having to scale a player’s individual ability with the importance of the position. It brings to mind Saquon Barkley, who was getting talked about like the best RB prospect people had ever seen. Sure, he ends up getting taken #2 (which got mixed-reviews), but a prospect of his caliber in the NBA would not only be an unquestionable #1 overall pick, but probably a top-3 asset overall. There’s other factors I can think of that make positional diversity in football an interesting factor in the draft (e.g. how well does a position project from college to pros, team needs become more pressing) but I’ll skip that for now.
Deeper talent pools
It’s really just a factor of team-size more than anything else. A NFL team carries a 64-man roster (most of whom receive playing time) compared to something like a 14-man roster for an NBA team. This makes the draft incredibly important for all the teams in the NFL, not just the teams picking from the very top-shelf picks.
The draft receives an enormous amount of coverage, but it’s mostly constrained within the window of immediately before and after the draft, when you have a really limited ability to accurately evaluate draft decisions. Most fans have some decent intuitive sense of how good a given draft was for their team, but it’s pretty hard to get good gradations in the murky area between all-star draft and complete bust. Even if you watch every game and have a really accurate sense of the quality of the players you still need to weigh that against how to factor in your team’s draft position into the evaluation. The team picking 1st should have a much higher baseline for the draft to be considered a hit than the team picking 32nd. Everyone’s aware of these factors, but I doubt more than a very small percentage of people not already employed by an NFL team, are capable of distinguishing the baseline, for say the 10th pick and 20th pick teams.
As a random aside, it used to really bug me when people kept bashing the Browns for picking Johnny Manziel for being a bust when he wasn’t even the biggest bust in his own team’s draft class (Justin Gilbert was taken seven spots higher), especially when you remember QB is a notoriously boom or bust position. Broadly speaking, don’t think critiques of a GM’s draft are valid, unless it’s taken over the course of >two years and they’re directed toward the holistic quality as opposed to any given individual pick.
This is all a setup to say that I created a baseline for expected draft value per position. I’ll write more about it in the next post, but all I did was average out the cumulative 4-year player value over five drafts together at each pick #.
