It’s no secret the draft is considered the foundation for building a successful team in the NFL. We all see teams using the draft wisely doing well, whether it’s the Patriots stockpiling picks or the Packers and Steelers continually replenishing their rosters from within instead of spending big bucks in free agency.
Other teams lean much more the other way, trading picks and spending those big free agency bucks to build their rosters. Washington and owner Dan Snyder are the poster franchise for this approach, which has garnered itself a poor reputation. My question is, is that actually a fair assessment? The Bears and the Jets have taken this road recently too, and both are coming off conference title game appearances.
The conventional wisdom that drafting is good and trading and spending is bad may be completely right, but I want some evidence- and if it is the case, I want to know how much more successful building through the draft is. It’s a hard question to answer because you fall into the trap of subjectively evaluating the players themselves, which nobody will ever completely agree on, and the goal here is some sort of objectivity.
What I’m going to do is take player evaluation compeltely out of the equation by simply assigning a value to the draft slot, not the player taken, for all picks made by each team over the past three drafts. There are 255 selections made every draft, so the value I have given to every pick is very simply 256 minus its slot. The first overall pick is worth 255 points, Mr. Irrelevant is worth 1 point.
Now hear me out on this, because I can imagine the faces some of you are making. I’m well aware most NFL teams utilize a far different point system to guide them in valuing draft picks. Just know that this system, developed over 20 years ago by a guy on the Cowboys staff with no football knowledge whatsoever, was constructed using the history of past draft trades and was only meant to show which teams routinely overpaid in trades compared to the league average (for the purposes of targeting them for a fleecing). My point being, it was never meant to properly value the actual picks- but that’s how it’s used.
My point system, when paired with the team’s winning percentage, is meant to show just how highly the effective use of the draft correlates to winning- more and higher picks should equate to a higher winning percentage if the conventional wisdom is right. It’s not perfect by any means, but if there’s something better out there I haven’t seen it.
What I do see, way too often, is too much being made of high round busts and late round steals, because the truth of the matter (they very likely completely even out) doesn’t leave very much for the TV analysts to talk about, does it? We try to be smarter than that here.
So lets look at some real numbers. The teams are ranked by their draft scores under my point system, cumulative over the past three seasons. The number that follows in brackets is the team’s winning percentage since the 2009 season began, up to and including Week 12 of 2011.
What we should see, if draft picks really are golden treasures to be hoarded, is a fairly orderly decline in the winning percentages as we go down the list. I have also asterisked all the teams appearing in the last three AFC and NFC title games.
Drum roll please…….
1. New England – 4273 (.744).
2. Denver – 4130 (.419).
3. Cleveland – 3636 (.326).
4. Philadelphia – 3631 (.581).
5. Buffalo – 3609 (.349).
6. Cincinnati – 3567 (.488).
7. Tennessee – 3390 (.465).
8. Kansas City – 3371 (419).
9. Houston – 3327 (.535).
10. St. Louis – 3272 (.233).
11. New York Giants – 3226 (.588).
12. Oakland – 3210 (.465).
13. *Pittsburgh – 3075 (.674).
14. Dallas – 3004 (.558).
15. Carolina – 2991 (.302).
16. *Green Bay – 2989 (.744).
17. Seattle – 2985 (.372).
18. Miami – 2974 (.395).
19. Detroit – 2965 (.349).
20. San Diego – 2929 (.605).
21. San Francisco – 2926 (.535).
22. *Baltimore – 2919 (.674).
23. Tampa Bay – 2914 (.395).
24. *Arizona – 2868 (.442).
25. Jacksonville – 2763 (.419).
26. Atlanta – 2740 (.674).
27. *Minnesota – 2721 (.465).
28. *Indianapolis – 2611 (.558).
29. Washington – 2479 (.326).
30. *New Orleans – 2292 (.744).
31. *Chicago – 2238 (.581).
32. *New York Jets – 1886 (.605).
Here are the things that pop out to me:
1) There are only three winning teams in the top ten, and one of them (Houston) has never made the playoffs before this year. There are five winning teams in the bottom ten, and strikingly it is home to six of the past eight conference finalists.
2) There is absolutely no rhyme or reason to the order of the winning percentages as you go down the list. Lets rephrase that in terms of what this list represents: there is very little recent correlation between building through the draft and winning games.
3) The obvious criticism of this point system: perennially poor teams will artificially wind up higher on this list by virtue of a steady stream of higher picks. I contend that’s a pretty circular argument- if draft picks deserve to be coveted the way they are, they should be accompanied by an improving win percentage when you isolate these teams. They’re not.
4) This year’s breakout team, the San Francisco 49ers, apparently did not arrive at this point by paying particular attention to drafting (checking in at #21 on the list).
5) The two teams best known for working the draft, New England and Philadelphia, not surprisingly scored highly. However neither of these teams have a title game asterisk to show for it.
Reflecting on these numbers, I don’t see any real reason for the shunning free agency and trading away picks usually incurs. At worst it’s an equally viable method for building a roster- one is not better than the other. I have to think the real value of draft picks is that (being an unknown quantity) they carry an element of hope that established players who, for better or worse, fans have already passed judgement on do not.