No NFL team can beat the draft

Great article. 100% agree with the premise. Playing the NFL Draft is almost like Vegas. You can win in the short term, but long term house always wins. The success rate after rounds 1 and 2 guarantees it.

Seattle is a good example, they crushed the draft from 2010-2012. Since then they've been pretty bad. But they have their core players in place at key positions, and will continue to be successful as a team.

Also look at what happened here in SF with Baalke. He crushed it in 2010 and 2011, after that....not so much.

Nailing the draft every year is impossible. You have to hit on the QB, and you have to have a couple solid drafts to lock up your core young talent.

Another good graph from the same site identifying which positions benefit the most from being taken early. LB's appear to give the most bang for the buck compared to drafting them late. QB's are a sketchy proposition but go off a cliff once you get to the third round. Brady throws off the averages a bit but otherwise the graph just flatlines until you hit UDFA(Warner, Romo) DB's also have a very high value early and then crater.






https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-hard-to-tell-how-good-nfl-teams-are-at-the-draft/

This is such a good post. Thanks for posting it. I don't know why, but a lot of fans have this have this misconception that teams across the NFL nail their draft picks year after year. Couldn't be farther from the truth. The majority of the league misses a lot more than they hit.



As a GM, I think the best recipe to longevity is to hire a great coach, maintain system continuity and hit home runs on the most important positions on the field(ie QB, left tackle, pass rushers). This will give you wiggle room when you miss in the draft, and it keep your team afloat.

VERY interesting. I've always wanted to see a graph that broke down success rate by round for each position.

Going in I thought OL would have the highest number of All-Pros, just because 5 of them start and drafting them in the 1st is usually a safe pick. A little surprised Linebacker was the top position, I wonder if that includes 3-4 OLBs who were DEs coming out of college.

RBs are a very good bet in the middle rounds. Was really high on Jordan Howard this past draft, he got picked in the 5th and looks like a steal.

The QB line is not surprising, but still staggering when you see it. Its RD 1 and 2, or bust. LOL at Brady throwing off the RD 6 figure all by himself.

Originally posted by SofaKing:
VERY interesting. I've always wanted to see a graph that broke down success rate by round for each position.

Going in I thought OL would have the highest number of All-Pros, just because 5 of them start and drafting them in the 1st is usually a safe pick. A little surprised Linebacker was the top position, I wonder if that includes 3-4 OLBs who were DEs coming out of college.

RBs are a very good bet in the middle rounds. Was really high on Jordan Howard this past draft, he got picked in the 5th and looks like a steal.

The QB line is not surprising, but still staggering when you see it. Its RD 1 and 2, or bust. LOL at Brady throwing off the RD 6 figure all by himself.

The way I read it, it includes anyone who plays LB in the NFL, regardless of what their college position was.

Originally posted by SofaKing:
Great article. 100% agree with the premise. Playing the NFL Draft is almost like Vegas. You can win in the short term, but long term house always wins. The success rate after rounds 1 and 2 guarantees it.

Seattle is a good example, they crushed the draft from 2010-2012. Since then they've been pretty bad. But they have their core players in place at key positions, and will continue to be successful as a team.

Also look at what happened here in SF with Baalke. He crushed it in 2010 and 2011, after that....not so much.

Nailing the draft every year is impossible. You have to hit on the QB, and you have to have a couple solid drafts to lock up your core young talent.

Agree

Seattle also picked up a couple of very good FA

Originally posted by SofaKing:

VERY interesting. I've always wanted to see a graph that broke down success rate by round for each position.

Going in I thought OL would have the highest number of All-Pros, just because 5 of them start and drafting them in the 1st is usually a safe pick. A little surprised Linebacker was the top position, I wonder if that includes 3-4 OLBs who were DEs coming out of college.

RBs are a very good bet in the middle rounds. Was really high on Jordan Howard this past draft, he got picked in the 5th and looks like a steal.

The QB line is not surprising, but still staggering when you see it. Its RD 1 and 2, or bust. LOL at Brady throwing off the RD 6 figure all by himself.

OL doesn't surprise me. Like QB, everyone is searching for LTs. It's just a high-demand position and highly overdrafted. I'm surprised DBs are so high though.

I bet if they broke out OGs and OTs, you'd see the guards much higher. Like an ILB, they just don't get frequently get drafted in the 1st unless they're projected to be Pro Bowl caliber.

Originally posted by Phoenix49ers:

Originally posted by SofaKing:
VERY interesting. I've always wanted to see a graph that broke down success rate by round for each position.

Going in I thought OL would have the highest number of All-Pros, just because 5 of them start and drafting them in the 1st is usually a safe pick. A little surprised Linebacker was the top position, I wonder if that includes 3-4 OLBs who were DEs coming out of college.

RBs are a very good bet in the middle rounds. Was really high on Jordan Howard this past draft, he got picked in the 5th and looks like a steal.

The QB line is not surprising, but still staggering when you see it. Its RD 1 and 2, or bust. LOL at Brady throwing off the RD 6 figure all by himself.

The way I read it, it includes anyone who plays LB in the NFL, regardless of what their college position was.

I see, that makes sense now. Thanks!

Originally posted by strickac:
OL doesn't surprise me. Like QB, everyone is searching for LTs. It's just a high-demand position and highly overdrafted. I'm surprised DBs are so high though.

I bet if they broke out OGs and OTs, you'd see the guards much higher. Like an ILB, they just don't get frequently get drafted in the 1st unless they're projected to be Pro Bowl caliber.

Good point. Kind of like when we picked Mike Iupati, I was almost certain the guy would be pro-bowl, all-pro caliber player. Same with Willis, a ILB

guess a good strategy would be to trade down in rd1 to a later rd 1 (of course can't if you're late rd anyways) to pick up an extra 1 next year or a couple of 2's.
also trade a 2 for a 1 next year - try to stockpile mid-to-late rd1 picks.

the use the baalke strategy of farming for picks later in the draft - its a crapshoot so might as well have a few extra shots

It doesn't surprise me that good drafters get worse. Just because there are 32 picks in the first round, doesn't mean that those players decrease linearly in skill/potential. I'd say the difference between the top 10-15 players and all the others is massive.

If you can start with a bad team, have a couple of years of high picks followed by maybe trading for a few more then you can get enough studs to get a winning record. Then you start having to draft at 15+ and you're back throwing darts at a board.

Originally posted by LasVegasWally:

Agree

Seattle also picked up a couple of very good FA

Bennett and Avril wasn't fair

Nice article. Draft is a crap shoot most of the time. I wonder if they did any analysis on poor drafts several years in a row? That's when GM's hit the road.

I don't have the time to read the full article.

But I'm guessing it has flawed methodology. I mean drafting is very difficult to assess on whether a pick was a good pick. You have to factor in:

-Unpredictable injuries (ie no injury history but then blows out knee in TC and never recovers. That doesn't make it a bad pick)
-Bad coaching/schemes that fail to develop a player or use them properly
-Bad team inhibiting the development of a player
-somewhat arbitrary nature to decide if a player is a success. For example a player might be great but not make a pro bowl
-differential value in picks, ie its more important to hit early picks than later picks because of salary cap investment
-more importance on GM filling a need, ie if the team has no LT and has 4 probowl DBs, its not as valuable that the GM drafted another DB that played well and ignored the LT spot
-Value of drafted player in making wins more likely is hard to assess
-Unknown lost opportunity. A GM might assess and value player very accurately, but because its a draft the player that he knows will "hit" is taken before he picks, and so his results appear worse because of his loss opportunity


edit:
Oh and finally not all positions have equal value. I believe you see LB have such a good hit rate because the position doesn't have inflated value, ie a belief you need a MLB to win and thus teams over-draft MLB.

IMO this is the main problem with QB. Everyone knows QBs are extremely high risk and low hit rate, but the position is so important they will always be over drafted. That doesn't mean GMs hitting on QB is luck and not skill. Its just a very complicated equation to judge