There have been 93 first overall NFL draft picks; only 12 are in the Hall of Fame, despite the fact that every draft class has produced multiple Hall of Famers. Now a few active players are likely to join the club, but the point stands.
Some positions are easier to draft than others, but even the safest positions are fraught with risk. How can this be when there are teams of human beings whose jobs are to spend an entire year putting together a draft plan? There are all kinds of pitfalls that teams end up in, and many ways teams could be improving drafting and development(watch a Michael MacKelvie video for more information), but that’s not what this is about.
Put simply, drafting is really, really hard. I don’t just mean that it that it requires tons of exhausting effort, though of course it does, or that it requires both immense talent and honed skill, though that is also true. I mean that drafting successfully is, past a certain point, impossible.
This is about how drafting is unavoidably, incurably flawed.
Injuries
First of all, a lot of guys bust at least in part due to injury, which is just inherently unpredictable. You can identify risk factors and compensate for them, but you can't predict individual injuries. So that already caps drafting in one important sense, but that’s not the sense that most people think of when they evaluate drafting. I would say most fans separate players who bust due to injury from those who simply weren’t as good as expected, but every player deals with injuries, and a clean line can't be drawn between those who disappointed because of injury and those who just disappointed. Injuries can take a hall of fame career to just a very good one, a very good one to an ok one, and so on. Besides, they are functionally the same, so that is, in an absolute sense, a limit on drafting. A huge one.
Sample Size
So, nowadays players probably only play three years on average. There are about 12 games in a season, not counting any bowl games or playoff games. Many of those games may be missed or not started due to injury. If those games that are played, many games probably don’t provide much information. They’re playing against awful teams, with players who can’t really challenge them, and who have no realistic chance of winning. Teams pull back, players may be benched partway through, coaches try to drain clock, and those games ultimately offer us very little. Games where guys are playing against something approaching NFL competition, that aren’t sabotaged by injury or other flukish events, often number relatively few.
The reality is, many times you’re drafting based on less than one NFL season’s worth of meaningful data, even in the first round. In the absolute best-case scenario, you have two seasons’ worth. Luck plays a huge factor over such a small span. When you think about it from that angle, it starts to make a lot more sense that players don’t always pan out. Even in the NFL, players will have good or great games and good or great years that they never come close to matching.
This, I think, is quite possibly the single biggest factor. What’s interesting to note, this is something that could theoretically be improved, at least to a point. But I don’t think NFL teams have much interest in that. We see time and time and time again that teams are very satisfied to take big chances on things they have very little information on, whether it’s drafting guys in the first round after one good year in college, or giving out huge contracts after one good year in the NFL, or moving on from guys after one bad year. A chance at greatness is just too good to pass up, even if it means giving up a surer chance at goodness.
Situation
Situation is 11 parts of NFL success, and they say there are but 12. This is an exaggeration, but not a huge one. There’s a famous study that a quarterback who goes later in the draft to a successful team, as defined by the parameters of the study, has a better chance of signing a second contract with that team than one who goes early to an unsuccessful team. To put this in less academic terms, the Cleveland Browns have drafted 15 QBs in the last 25 years. Even taking out Baker Mayfield, who was underwhelming with the Browns(at least compared to the lofty expectations placed upon him), but who’s become a two-time and counting pro-bowler with the Buccaneers, what are the odds that all 14 of those guys, many of them 1rst rounders, were all just totally unfit for the NFL? Similarly, the Chicago Bears have never had a 4000 yard passer. What are the odds that none of the QBs who played for them since Joe Namath broke the 4000-yard barrier in 1967 could have done so had they gone to a friendlier situation? Luck plays a role here, of course, but luck can't be the only factor for runs this colossally bad. Situation is everything. If situation were easy to analyze, then this wouldn’t be a problem. But in many ways, it’s even harder to analyze than drafting. Every year is a new roster, we don't know how free agents will adjust, there will be other rookies who are also totally unknown quantities, and while we can make ok assessments and predictions about rosters, these are far from sure.
Time & Mercy
The amount of time and room for error you are given to develop will vary enormously. Teams will often give huge leeway to a first-rounder, and almost none to lower-rounders. In many ways, draft position is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're expected to be good, early mistakes are "struggles." If you're expected to be bad, mistakes are just indicative of who you are.
Transitions
The college-to-NFL jump is a precipitous one in virtually all aspects. Needless to say, the jump in competition is huge. Many guys who looked great were benefiting massively from inferior competition. And even if you can be great against great competition, can you do it consistently, week after week, year after year? In college, you only face truly great competition a few times a season, if that.
What about how you handle failure? If you’re being drafted high, you’re usually going to a team that really, really sucks. All your life in sports up to this point, you’ve been massively successful, otherwise, you wouldn’t be so highly drafted. When those early struggles and defeats come in, are you going to be able to handle it, and learn from it?
Beyond the field, the life of a college football player is often a tightly regulated one, at least compared to an NFL player. How do you handle suddenly having far fewer restrictions and far more capital? There’s also the question of how you handle having achieved what you’ve been working for, and needing to maintain it. As Spock said, having and wanting are very different. For highly drafted players in particular, the jump in money and status is often enormous; you can live lavishly and never have to work again after your rookie contract if you go in the upper part of the first round. I think NIL and the transfer portal will mitigate these particular issues to a significant extent, and we’re only beginning to see this impacts of that, but it will always remain an issue.
It’s a Team sport
The ultimate team sport is a title that I’ve heard attributed to both baseball and football. Both are true, depending on your interpretation. Baseball is the ultimate team sport as far as the limits of one player to affect change over a full season.
Football is the ultimate team sport in the sense that no one’s contributions can ever be fully separated from anyone else’s on the field. You can’t catch the ball unless someone throws it to you, you can’t throw the ball unless someone’s open, and you cant do anything without blocking. But lest you think blocking is independent, sacks depend more on the QB than the line, something that has been rigorously demonstrated multiple times. According to Mark Sanchez, who’s a reliable enough source for me, it is universally acknowledged that defense is a bit less interdependent than offense, but the line needs the secondary, and the secondary needs the line. On the line, players benefit from how much blocking attention is devoted to other players, and many, many solo sacks come about from pressure generated by another. In the secondary, how many interceptions come off a deflection from another player? And on and on and on. This places an inherent limit on how much we can know about the value of individual players. Sure, we can get a pretty good idea of who deserves what, especially over a huge sample size, and we’re getting better as time goes on, but a great deal of ambiguity still remains, even at the highest levels.
Conclusion
There’s just no way to eliminate uncertainty in drafting. Do not misunderstand me: Teams do draft stupidly, all the time, and there are countless avenues for improvement. But no team can ever draft intelligently enough to succeed all the time. There’s just too much we don’t know, too much we can’t know.
We don’t want to think about this uncertainty. We like to feel that we’re in control, even if it means that our misfortunes are our fault. The reality is that the smartest move can screw your team for years, and a stupid one can be rewarded.
Fundamentally, we also want to believe that the system works; if a guy could succeed in the NFL, then he will, if he tries hard enough, but that’s not true. The reality is that for every Hall of Famer, there are probably three or four who fell through the cracks somewhere along the way. We don't want that to be true, but it is.
Matthew Thayer
There have been 93 first overall NFL draft picks; only 12 are in the Hall of Fame, despite the fact that every draft class has produced multiple Hall of Famers. Now a few active players are likely to join the club, but the point stands.
Some positions are easier to draft than others, but even the safest positions are fraught with risk. How can this be when there are teams of human beings whose jobs are to spend an entire year putting together a draft plan? There are all kinds of pitfalls that teams end up in, and many ways teams could be improving drafting and development(watch a Michael MacKelvie video for more information), but that’s not what this is about.
Put simply, drafting is really, really hard. I don’t just mean that it that it requires tons of exhausting effort, though of course it does, or that it requires both immense talent and honed skill, though that is also true. I mean that drafting successfully is, past a certain point, impossible.
This is about how drafting is unavoidably, incurably flawed.
Injuries
First of all, a lot of guys bust at least in part due to injury, which is just inherently unpredictable. You can identify risk factors and compensate for them, but you can't predict individual injuries. So that already caps drafting in one important sense, but that’s not the sense that most people think of when they evaluate drafting. I would say most fans separate players who bust due to injury from those who simply weren’t as good as expected, but every player deals with injuries, and a clean line can't be drawn between those who disappointed because of injury and those who just disappointed. Injuries can take a hall of fame career to just a very good one, a very good one to an ok one, and so on. Besides, they are functionally the same, so that is, in an absolute sense, a limit on drafting. A huge one.
Sample Size
So, nowadays players probably only play three years on average. There are about 12 games in a season, not counting any bowl games or playoff games. Many of those games may be missed or not started due to injury. If those games that are played, many games probably don’t provide much information. They’re playing against awful teams, with players who can’t really challenge them, and who have no realistic chance of winning. Teams pull back, players may be benched partway through, coaches try to drain clock, and those games ultimately offer us very little. Games where guys are playing against something approaching NFL competition, that aren’t sabotaged by injury or other flukish events, often number relatively few.
The reality is, many times you’re drafting based on less than one NFL season’s worth of meaningful data, even in the first round. In the absolute best-case scenario, you have two seasons’ worth. Luck plays a huge factor over such a small span. When you think about it from that angle, it starts to make a lot more sense that players don’t always pan out. Even in the NFL, players will have good or great games and good or great years that they never come close to matching.
This, I think, is quite possibly the single biggest factor. What’s interesting to note, this is something that could theoretically be improved, at least to a point. But I don’t think NFL teams have much interest in that. We see time and time and time again that teams are very satisfied to take big chances on things they have very little information on, whether it’s drafting guys in the first round after one good year in college, or giving out huge contracts after one good year in the NFL, or moving on from guys after one bad year. A chance at greatness is just too good to pass up, even if it means giving up a surer chance at goodness.
Situation
Situation is 11 parts of NFL success, and they say there are but 12. This is an exaggeration, but not a huge one. There’s a famous study that a quarterback who goes later in the draft to a successful team, as defined by the parameters of the study, has a better chance of signing a second contract with that team than one who goes early to an unsuccessful team. To put this in less academic terms, the Cleveland Browns have drafted 15 QBs in the last 25 years. Even taking out Baker Mayfield, who was underwhelming with the Browns(at least compared to the lofty expectations placed upon him), but who’s become a two-time and counting pro-bowler with the Buccaneers, what are the odds that all 14 of those guys, many of them 1rst rounders, were all just totally unfit for the NFL? Similarly, the Chicago Bears have never had a 4000 yard passer. What are the odds that none of the QBs who played for them since Joe Namath broke the 4000-yard barrier in 1967 could have done so had they gone to a friendlier situation? Luck plays a role here, of course, but luck can't be the only factor for runs this colossally bad. Situation is everything. If situation were easy to analyze, then this wouldn’t be a problem. But in many ways, it’s even harder to analyze than drafting. Every year is a new roster, we don't know how free agents will adjust, there will be other rookies who are also totally unknown quantities, and while we can make ok assessments and predictions about rosters, these are far from sure.
Time & Mercy
The amount of time and room for error you are given to develop will vary enormously. Teams will often give huge leeway to a first-rounder, and almost none to lower-rounders. In many ways, draft position is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're expected to be good, early mistakes are "struggles." If you're expected to be bad, mistakes are just indicative of who you are.
Transitions
The college-to-NFL jump is a precipitous one in virtually all aspects. Needless to say, the jump in competition is huge. Many guys who looked great were benefiting massively from inferior competition. And even if you can be great against great competition, can you do it consistently, week after week, year after year? In college, you only face truly great competition a few times a season, if that.
What about how you handle failure? If you’re being drafted high, you’re usually going to a team that really, really sucks. All your life in sports up to this point, you’ve been massively successful, otherwise, you wouldn’t be so highly drafted. When those early struggles and defeats come in, are you going to be able to handle it, and learn from it?
Beyond the field, the life of a college football player is often a tightly regulated one, at least compared to an NFL player. How do you handle suddenly having far fewer restrictions and far more capital? There’s also the question of how you handle having achieved what you’ve been working for, and needing to maintain it. As Spock said, having and wanting are very different. For highly drafted players in particular, the jump in money and status is often enormous; you can live lavishly and never have to work again after your rookie contract if you go in the upper part of the first round. I think NIL and the transfer portal will mitigate these particular issues to a significant extent, and we’re only beginning to see this impacts of that, but it will always remain an issue.
It’s a Team sport
The ultimate team sport is a title that I’ve heard attributed to both baseball and football. Both are true, depending on your interpretation. Baseball is the ultimate team sport as far as the limits of one player to affect change over a full season.
Football is the ultimate team sport in the sense that no one’s contributions can ever be fully separated from anyone else’s on the field. You can’t catch the ball unless someone throws it to you, you can’t throw the ball unless someone’s open, and you cant do anything without blocking. But lest you think blocking is independent, sacks depend more on the QB than the line, something that has been rigorously demonstrated multiple times. According to Mark Sanchez, who’s a reliable enough source for me, it is universally acknowledged that defense is a bit less interdependent than offense, but the line needs the secondary, and the secondary needs the line. On the line, players benefit from how much blocking attention is devoted to other players, and many, many solo sacks come about from pressure generated by another. In the secondary, how many interceptions come off a deflection from another player? And on and on and on. This places an inherent limit on how much we can know about the value of individual players. Sure, we can get a pretty good idea of who deserves what, especially over a huge sample size, and we’re getting better as time goes on, but a great deal of ambiguity still remains, even at the highest levels.
Conclusion
There’s just no way to eliminate uncertainty in drafting. Do not misunderstand me: Teams do draft stupidly, all the time, and there are countless avenues for improvement. But no team can ever draft intelligently enough to succeed all the time. There’s just too much we don’t know, too much we can’t know.
We don’t want to think about this uncertainty. We like to feel that we’re in control, even if it means that our misfortunes are our fault. The reality is that the smartest move can screw your team for years, and a stupid one can be rewarded.
Fundamentally, we also want to believe that the system works; if a guy could succeed in the NFL, then he will, if he tries hard enough, but that’s not true. The reality is that for every Hall of Famer, there are probably three or four who fell through the cracks somewhere along the way. We don't want that to be true, but it is.
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