{"id":25710,"date":"2014-05-12T07:25:40","date_gmt":"2014-05-12T12:25:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=25710"},"modified":"2014-05-12T07:27:05","modified_gmt":"2014-05-12T12:27:05","slug":"evaluating-nfl-team-drafts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/05\/12\/evaluating-nfl-team-drafts\/","title":{"rendered":"Evaluating NFL team drafts"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"It’s said that you can’t evaluate a draft class until three years later, because you need at least that long to see which players have established careers and which ones are no longer in the league, rather than who won the popularity contest before the draft. Despite that, many talking heads on TV have been eagerly assigning grades to the just-concluded NFL draft, and the fans of each team eagerly follow the narrative. Even Arif Hasan<\/a> has fallen victim to this temptation, although he’s at least trying to follow a methodology to determine the overall strength or weakness of each team’s 2014 draft class.<\/p>\n

One of the interesting things about gathering Big Boards across the country and finding the different ways that evaluators grade the players is that it gives us an ability to take a look at the draft from their perspective. There\u2019s a big stigma against \u201cgrading the draft,\u201d that I don\u2019t think makes a lot of sense because we\u2019re so willing to share our opinions on the players and teams who drafted them in every other way.<\/p>\n

It seems we can give opinions about individual players and their teams without criticism. but as soon as we summarize it in a letter grade, we\u2019re doing something wrong and have to wait. Instead, it may be better to wait three years to judge it.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s no fun, and we want feedback. We just have to acknowledge we have a high band of uncertainty and give our impressions of the draft.<\/p>\n

But how about instead of inserting post-hoc opinions about our favorite team, we take a look at a metric we\u2019ve already laid the groundwork for? Let\u2019s compare a team\u2019s draft capital to what the Big Boards accumulated said.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not perfect, especially in a deep draft, but by assigning players in their rankings an amount of points equal to the trade charts\u2019 equivalent pick value, we can find out what players are considered to be worth. Using the NFL Trade Value Chart (put together by Jimmy Johnson way back when), we can compare the amount of draft capital a team entered the draft with to the \u201cvalue\u201d of players selected. This is perhaps the most appropriate way to gauge the number of \u201csteals\u201d and \u201creaches\u201d a team makes and quantifying.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Spoiler:<\/p>\n

\"Arif's<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s said that you can’t evaluate a draft class until three years later, because you need at least that long to see which players have established careers and which ones are no longer in the league, rather than who won the popularity contest before the draft. Despite that, many talking heads on TV have been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[126,179,960],"class_list":["post-25710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-football","tag-minnesotavikings","tag-nfl","tag-nfldraft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6GG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25710"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25712,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25710\/revisions\/25712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}