The New NFL - Positional Value - NFL Draft Round 1 value

[NBP81]

Im finished with the data part of the project.

Some things confirm what we already knew, although I did not expect such a gap between QB and other positions. You'll also notice the slope starts going up for all positions and then drops down again. While I havent tried to play with the data to explain this yet. My off the top of my head crack at it is the rookie wage scale... Which looks like this: (sorry for the ugly chart lol)


Thats a very steep slope and as you'll see in the EV chart, the EV starts to stabilize around the same place where the salaries slope stabilizes.

A few things to consider, the elite category was harder to separate from the good for a few positions. All OL positions, ILB and interiorDL are part of this group. Whats interesting is that also showed up in the salaries, OL for example didnt have a big gap between elite salaries and good salaries, that even extended to jag players. And this is not driven by my analysis, I used quantiles to define group vet salaries...

What I get from this is, it is just as hard for NFL people to evaluate those group as it is from us. The lack of quantifiable data makes it hard for everyone to separate them into tiers.

Also notice that a couple of positions are actually undraftable at the very top of the draft.

**I sorry I couldnt separate DBs into CB and safety categories, my datasource did a bad job of labeling them and while I did have some correctly labeled, the vast majority were labeled as DB. This could have been corrected, but it would have been time consuming as **** as different sites name players differently. Just decided to put them all together. So for the DBs, just assume CBs have a bit more EV and take off a couple of points for safeties.**

Here's the chart: (the interactive one is linked underneath)



https://public.tableau.com/views/NF...ille2?:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link

 

[Carne Asada]

Im finished with the data part of the project.

Some things confirm what we already knew, although I did not expect such a gap between QB and other positions. You'll also notice the slope starts going up for all positions and then drops down again. While I havent tried to play with the data to explain this yet. My off the top of my head crack at it is the rookie wage scale... Which looks like this: (sorry for the ugly chart lol)
View attachment 35312

Thats a very steep slope and as you'll see in the EV chart, the EV starts to stabilize around the same place where the salaries slope stabilizes.

A few things to consider, the elite category was harder to separate from the good for a few positions. All OL positions, ILB and interiorDL are part of this group. Whats interesting is that also showed up in the salaries, OL for example didnt have a big gap between elite salaries and good salaries, that even extended to jag players. And this is not driven by my analysis, I used quantiles to define group vet salaries...

What I get from this is, it is just as hard for NFL people to evaluate those group as it is from us. The lack of quantifiable data makes it hard for everyone to separate them into tiers.

Also notice that a couple of positions are actually undraftable at the very top of the draft.

**I sorry I couldnt separate DBs into CB and safety categories, my datasource did a bad job of labeling them and while I did have some correctly labeled, the vast majority were labeled as DB. This could have been corrected, but it would have been time consuming as **** as different sites name players differently. Just decided to put them all together. So for the DBs, just assume CBs have a bit more EV and take off a couple of points for safeties.**

Here's the chart: (the interactive one is linked underneath)

View attachment 35314

https://public.tableau.com/views/NF...ille2?:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link

I think the uptick in the top of the 2nd round comes from teams reaching for players in the middle, late first, combined with the competition the drafted players will have on their teams. Top 2nd rd picks from bad teams get to start their rookie years almost 100% of the time while middling teams with mediocre plan As trying to upgrade sometimes don't put the rookies in good position to succeed.

Like us, the last few years.

I find really interesting OT turned out the 2nd most impact position. I also didn't expect off lb to be that high.

 

[NBP81]

I think the uptick in the top of the 2nd round comes from teams reaching for players in the middle, late first, combined with the competition the drafted players will have on their teams. Top 2nd rd picks from bad teams get to start their rookie years almost 100% of the time while middling teams with mediocre plan As trying to upgrade sometimes don't put the rookies in good position to succeed.

Like us, the last few years.

I find really interesting OT turned out the 2nd most impact position. I also didn't expect off lb to be that high.

Im not sure, but from the rookie wage chart, you can see the salaries droping almost vertically around that part of the draft. Im almost positive that tick is related to that, as it seems to happen to every position groups at the same time.

As for the LBs, I also think they are overrated, they might still getting overpaid by the NFL in general, boosting their actual expected value. Like I said before, this is another position that's hard to separate into tiers. The most used metric for them is tackles, and its a flawed metric to begin with. IMO

 

[The Ghost]

if i was GM, I would never take a RB or WR in round 1. Probably not until round 4 the earliest.

Saquon Barkley? The best to ever come out supposedly? His team has won few games this year.

Even DE, Chandler Jones is the top in the league, his team has won very few games this year.

Xavien Howard is one of the best CBs? His team has won 3 games.

AJ Green is one of the best WRs? His team has won very few games this year.

Khalil Mack? Same thing.

Not really the appropriate route to take when analyzing these positions. You named the best player on the worst teams in the league so it's not a fair way to look at things. You could do that with every position.

DE's and CB's are critical but matter not when your QB play is terrible and/or your roster is one of the worst in the league.

Jason Taylor played on some good teams and bad teams but most of the time was pretty elite regardless.

I agree that taking a RB at No.2 isn't ideal but did the Chargers make a mistake taking Tomlinson at 6 I believe? You get a guy like that and you never think twice about it.

Definitely don't see the need for taking a WR in the first round, almost ever. You get the rare talent like Randy Moss falling into the 20's? Maybe. If your drafting in the top 10 and select a WR, you'll be more than likely drafting in the top 10 a lot more.

What makes the NFL draft so unique and intriguing is that there is no one correct formula for building a successful team. A great OG or C can do as much if not more for an offense than anyone else, at any given point in the draft.

 

[fansinceGWilson]

Im finished with the data part of the project.

Some things confirm what we already knew, although I did not expect such a gap between QB and other positions. You'll also notice the slope starts going up for all positions and then drops down again. While I havent tried to play with the data to explain this yet. My off the top of my head crack at it is the rookie wage scale... Which looks like this: (sorry for the ugly chart lol)
View attachment 35312

Thats a very steep slope and as you'll see in the EV chart, the EV starts to stabilize around the same place where the salaries slope stabilizes.

A few things to consider, the elite category was harder to separate from the good for a few positions. All OL positions, ILB and interiorDL are part of this group. Whats interesting is that also showed up in the salaries, OL for example didnt have a big gap between elite salaries and good salaries, that even extended to jag players. And this is not driven by my analysis, I used quantiles to define group vet salaries...

What I get from this is, it is just as hard for NFL people to evaluate those group as it is from us. The lack of quantifiable data makes it hard for everyone to separate them into tiers.

Also notice that a couple of positions are actually undraftable at the very top of the draft.

**I sorry I couldnt separate DBs into CB and safety categories, my datasource did a bad job of labeling them and while I did have some correctly labeled, the vast majority were labeled as DB. This could have been corrected, but it would have been time consuming as **** as different sites name players differently. Just decided to put them all together. So for the DBs, just assume CBs have a bit more EV and take off a couple of points for safeties.**

Here's the chart: (the interactive one is linked underneath)

View attachment 35314

https://public.tableau.com/views/NF...ille2?:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link

Edge and RB were most surprising. For all the debate about the diamonds that are found in the later rounds for QB, looks like the drop off for QB is steepest, though, admittedly, from a higher start

 

[rickd13]

I'd say, considering busts like Jamarcus Russell and Ryan Leaf, that smart GMs would trade down and pick up a haul of picks they could use.

That's using 20/20 hindsight. Should we go back and look at all the busts at other positions? Can't we go back through every draft and say that any team that needed a QB but passed on one only to have a franchise QB be drafted that same year regret their decision?

 

[NBP81]

Edge and RB were most surprising. For all the debate about the diamonds that are found in the later rounds for QB, looks like the drop off for QB is steepest, though, admittedly, from a higher start

I shouldnt be surprised that you got that fine point right. The slope of these curves might be the second most important takeaway from these charts, after the actual peak and where they occur...

The actual value at each pick should be used as a team building strategy tool, while the slopes and peaks should be useful for draft strategy, if interpreted correctly.

 

[NBP81]

I agree that taking a RB at No.2 isn't ideal but did the Chargers make a mistake taking Tomlinson at 6 I believe? You get a guy like that and you never think twice about it.

Tomlinson was drafted in 2001 IIRC... I already did some digging about the value of a running game before so I'll just use that old chart to make a point here. The chart is showing the results from regressesion analysis contrasting how the passing game/running game relates to points scored. Here's the chart:



Tomlinson was drafted right around a point in time where running the ball was the most useful as it has been in the last 30+ years. And then this happened:



This event destroyed the actual value of a dominant running game.

 

[NBP81]

The way I see it...

The value of draft picks is directly associated to your team composition.

If somehow, we were able to establish an absolute value for each specific position on a football team, we'd actually be able to assign a perfect value for each specific draft pick in the draft, for every team participating in that draft.

Of course, we're no where near that but we can still make some assumptions.

For one thing, we can assume pretty confidently that QB is the most important position in football and that the #1 overall pick is the most valuable pick in the NFL draft.

From that, we can then form the theory that the #1 overall pick is more valuable to a team that doesnt have the QB position solved than it is to a team that isnt still looking for a QB. In other words, the team that already has the QB cannot benefit from the value of the best QB in the draft while the team without absolutely can.

But the team that already has the QB doesnt get exposed to the variance implied with making that pick, it already has the position solved. So it is perfectly fine with that particular pick having less value to him, compared to his opponent. The value of the player he is picking doesnt change, while the value of the pick is lesser. This is how you add value.

My takeaway is, solve critical positions first... The more critical positions you have solved, the more likely you are to get a player with more value than the actual pick you used to get him on your team.

I quoted my post because I want to expand on what I said there. I just got done with what amounts to about a month of work on this, not full time of course, but still a shitload of hours so I was kind of excited to finally have the results in front of me.

This figures to be a long ass one, as I will explain the whole thing and how *I think* it relates to team building.

IMO the salary cap is the actual amount of talent you're allowed to have on your team. At least theorically. And the number of picks you get per year is your pipeline for adding talent. In order to quantifiy the value of a draft pick, we need to connect the 2. This was the main idea that drove me to start this research. What is the value of a draft pick?

Expected value is a well known term,

The expected value (EV) is an anticipated value for an investment at some point in the future. In statistics and probability analysis, the expected value is calculated by multiplying each of the possible outcomes by the likelihood each outcome will occur and then summing all of those values. By calculating expected values, investors can choose the scenario most likely to give the desired outcome.

And so I took 30 years worth of draft picks, classified them into 4 categories: Elite, Good, Jag and bust. This part was a grind, I tried alot of different ways to get those right, at some point realized that no matter what metrics I'd use for different positions, the ratios would change very marginally.

Then it was all a metter of getting odds for every category and positions for each draft picks. We cant use the raw data by itself, we need to smooth out the curves a little bit. So I built a multinomial logistic regression for that part. This is how I got the % used for the EV formula.

Then I needed the outcome, which is player salary. Here we assume that money is directly associated with talent. Which can be flawed on a case by case analysis but seems to hold true when used on a whole population. All I needed was the average salary for 4 different groups[elite, good,jag,bust] and around 10 different positions.

Then its just filling up the EV formula. I substracted the rookie salary associated with each pick to result. The slope of the rookie salaries was simply to steep to ignore, had it been more linear, I might have just ignored it.

Now what I think it all means?

Those results pretty much confirmed what I originally thought...

1. QB obviously
2. T theorically I know it makes sense but I was somewhat surprised it actually came out 2nd
3. WR again, Im surprised, but this just pretty much follows the theory that the passing game is king
4. Bunch of positions really close to each other
5. RB, TE and interior OL basically undraftable at the top of the draft. Does that really surprise anyone?

Now to elaborate on my previous post...

For a team starting from scratch, we could view the actual expected value of draft picks for that team to be the average of all of the positions available to them's expected value.

This average EV is shown as the red line on the chart
The average EV when a team already has QB sloved is the yellow line on the chart
The average EV when a team has both QB and T solved is the green line


Now nevermind that those positions are QB, T and WR in that order, the real takeaway here is that by nailing higher value positions, you are lowering the actual value of a draft pick to your team. While this might sound counter intuitive, this is actually a good thing. We've all heard the saying getting value from the draft, IMO the way to get value from your draft picks is to get players who have more value than the pick you used to get them.

Sure as a GM, you are looking at this problem and trying to fix your end of it, get better at picking good players... But fundamentally, I think trying to increase the value of the players you pick might just be thougher, and more out of your control, than just trying to nail high priority positions first, thus lowering the overall value of your draft picks, making it easier for you to actually get value.

 

[Awsi Dooger]

I think the uptick in the top of the 2nd round comes from teams reaching for players in the middle, late first, combined with the competition the drafted players will have on their teams. Top 2nd rd picks from bad teams get to start their rookie years almost 100% of the time while middling teams with mediocre plan As trying to upgrade sometimes don't put the rookies in good position to succeed.

I love early second round, compared to the alternatives. I have emphasized that here for years. Stay within the Top 40 if trading down. Move into the Top 40 if trading up. Don't make subjective evaluations on strength of the draft year to year and rationalize that 45 is the new 40 in a given year. You'll only confuse matters. Just use that 40 as guideline.

I agree it seems to be a case of teams dependably making odd choices late first round, let's say at pick 20, allowing very good players to slide. I'm always struck that early second round still seems like first round caliber athletes then later in that round it becomes grab bag central.

Anyway, I hadn't sampled this thread in a couple of days. I'm extremely impressed by the latest contributors, and amused by the one dependable exception.

 

[j-off-her-doll]

I love early second round, compared to the alternatives. I have emphasized that here for years. Stay within the Top 40 if trading down. Move into the Top 40 if trading up. Don't make subjective evaluations on strength of the draft year to year and rationalize that 45 is the new 40 in a given year. You'll only confuse matters. Just use that 40 as guideline.

I agree it seems to be a case of teams dependably making odd choices late first round, let's say at pick 20, allowing very good players to slide. I'm always struck that early second round still seems like first round caliber athletes then later in that round it becomes grab bag central.

Anyway, I hadn't sampled this thread in a couple of days. I'm extremely impressed by the latest contributors, and amused by the one dependable exception.

This is why I group players as Top 10, Top 20, and Top 40 - rather than Top 10, 1st RD, and 2nd RD. Not only is it more accurate imo, but it's also a lot easier/makes more sense as I'm doing it.

 

[Lovethefish]

This is why I group players as Top 10, Top 20, and Top 40 - rather than Top 10, 1st RD, and 2nd RD. Not only is it more accurate imo, but it's also a lot easier/makes more sense as I'm doing it.

Good point. The 32 teams just happens to be the number of teams in the league creating a “RD1.”
Each draft is different though.
Sometimes there is a top 5, top 7, top 10.
So this year IMO:
Group 1:
Burrow- given production, skill & position class by himself. You cannot have him for any cost. He will go #1.

Group 2: 5 Players.
Expect Multiple Pro Bowls:
Okudah, Andrew Thomas, Chase Young, Derrick Brown, Isaiah Simmons.

 

[NBP81]

I love early second round, compared to the alternatives. I have emphasized that here for years. Stay within the Top 40 if trading down. Move into the Top 40 if trading up. Don't make subjective evaluations on strength of the draft year to year and rationalize that 45 is the new 40 in a given year. You'll only confuse matters. Just use that 40 as guideline.

I agree it seems to be a case of teams dependably making odd choices late first round, let's say at pick 20, allowing very good players to slide. I'm always struck that early second round still seems like first round caliber athletes then later in that round it becomes grab bag central.

Anyway, I hadn't sampled this thread in a couple of days. I'm extremely impressed by the latest contributors, and amused by the one dependable exception.

This is why I group players as Top 10, Top 20, and Top 40 - rather than Top 10, 1st RD, and 2nd RD. Not only is it more accurate imo, but it's also a lot easier/makes more sense as I'm doing it.

40 is actually a pretty decent threshold. Looking at the raw data from all drafts going back to 1990, pick 40 is right at the end of the steep slope of total elite players for individual draft picks, while the good players total is still holding steady at 40, right until around pick 55 where there's a significant drop.

 

[j-off-her-doll]

Good point. The 32 teams just happens to be the number of teams in the league creating a “RD1.”
Each draft is different though.
Sometimes there is a top 5, top 7, top 10.
So this year IMO:
Group 1:
Burrow- given production, skill & position class by himself. You cannot have him for any cost. He will go #1.

Group 2: 5 Players.
Expect Multiple Pro Bowls:
Okudah, Andrew Thomas, Chase Young, Derrick Brown, Isaiah Simmons.

Agree with your line of thought, but right now, I don't see the separation from the Group 2 players you listed and players like Lamb, Higgins, and probably Wirfs.

 

[Lovethefish]

Agree with your line of thought, but right now, I don't see the separation from the Group 2 players you listed and players like Lamb, Higgins, and probably Wirfs.

I think that’s fair. For me though - I’m not sure I can so clearly distinguish Lamb- Higgins from Shenault, Jefferson, Hill, Jeudy, etc.
Do Lamb - Higgins project to be a Michael Thomas , Julio Jones, Mike Evans dominant type? Idk.
I guess for me RB or WR top tier has to be super dominant ie above mentioned.