The Happy-Making NFL Draft

Joe Posnanski had an interesting post about the reaction to the NFL draft. He comments on the GMs and draft runners "doing their annual 'I can’t believe he was still there' dance." Yeah, everybody's happy after the draft. Everybody's talking about the steals they got.

The thing is, if you think about it, it's pretty obvious why that is.

Nobody sees the players in the draft in exactly the same way. Go around the league and talk to the GMs of every team, and you'll get different evaluations of every single player. Now, there will be limits to this, of course. You'll be hard pressed to find an NFL talent evaluator who doesn't think Gerald McCoy is a terrific talent, for instance. However, you'll find lots of variation in how much that evaluator wants to get McCoy on his particular team, based on team need for defensive tackles, based on defensive scheme, based on their read of his character, and based on straight-up evaluation of football talent. Among other things. The end result is that nobody's evaluation on any one player is quite the same, and nobody's draft board is going to look quite like anybody else's. There will be a lot of variation.

So, here's a simplified experiment. Let's assume, just for the sake of discussion, that the value of every player in the draft can be quantified as a single whole number. To mimic the variation we just talked about, every player's value has to be seen by each team as filtered through the eyes of their scouts. No team's scouts will miss on a player's value by more than 20%. A player worth 50 might be seen as worth 60 by one team, and 40 by another, but no more or less than that. Teams will always take the player on their board with the highest numerical value, because in this simplified world, they don't have to worry about positional scarcity. Is this entirely realistic? No, but it's actually pretty similar to the way teams are forced to think when they set up their draft boards.

Let's say the top player in this year's draft was worth 100 points, the second best player was worth 99 points, and so on, down through the end of the first round where the 32nd player was worth 69 points. How might this theoretical draft play out?

Well, I used a random number generator to come up with a bunch of numbers between -20 and +20, which we'll use as our scouting filter to determine each team's evaluation of each player, with a negative number subtracting that percentage from each player's score, and a positive number adding that much. (So, a -10 for the player worth 80 would make his evaluation by that team a 72, a +10 would make it an 88.)

Our first team, we'll call them the Rams, rolled a -14 and -18 for the actual top two players in the draft, so their evaluations dipped dramatically. However, they rolled a +18 for player #7, making his evaluation in their eyes a 110.92.

#1 - Rams - Player7 - Actual worth, 94 - Perceived worth, 110.92 - Rank on team board - 1

The team picking second, the Lions, rolls a +14 on player2, giving him the highest value of anyone in the draft.

#2 - Lions - Player2 - Actual worth, 99 - Perceived worth, 112.86 - Rank on team board - 1

Picking third, the Bucs rolled a 19 on the top player, making him their no-brainer pick.

#3 - Bucs - Player1 - Actual worth, 100 - Perceived worth, 119.0 - Rank on team board - 1

Here's the top 16 picks done in this fashion, with team name, player, Actual worth, perceived worth, and rank on team board.

1. Rams - Player7 - 94 - 110.92 - 1
2. Lions - Player2 - 99 - 112.86 - 1
3. Bucs - Player1 - 100 - 119.0 - 1
4. Redskins - Player5 - 96 - 111.36 - 2
5. Chiefs - Player6 - 95 - 101.65 - 2
6. Seahawks - Player8 - 93 - 110.67 - 1
7. Browns - Player3 - 98 - 106.82 - 3
8. Raiders - Player4 - 97 - 116.4 - 1
9. Bills - Player12 - 89 - 103.24 - 3
10. Jaguars - Player10 - 91 - 102.83 - 7
11. 49ers - Player 9 - 92 - 104.88 - 7
12. Chargers - Player14 - 87 - 102.66 - 4
13. Eagles - Player18 - 83 - 98.77 - 6
14. Seahawks - Player16 - 85 - 101.15 - 5
15. Giants - Player11 - 90 - 108.0 - 1
16. Titans - Player19 - 82 - 90.2 - 10

Pretty interesting. It didn't go in order of actual value, of course. However, only two picks were made of players outside the top 16, and they weren't far outside. 20% variance didn't exactly create total chaos in how the draft played out. The Eagles and Rams reached, and the Browns, Raiders and Giants did very well for themselves. Out of 16 teams, 6 got the top player on their board, and most importantly, nobody got stuck with their worst case scenario, or anything very close to it. The Titans, who looking at the objective numbers, didn't do all that well, would still have cause to crow after this draft; they got their 10th rated player in the 16 slot, which doesn't seem bad. The Chargers, they got their #4 target at #12. Even though we, looking at the objective numbers, know they actually didn't do as well as they could have, from their perspective they'd have cause to celebrate.

So why are so many teams so happy after the draft? Maybe in part because they're putting on an act, sure. But almost certainly it's due in large part to the subjective nature of the draft, and the way very few teams ever get stuck with the player that they "should" get looking at their draft board ahead of time.