The Big Lead

The Draft Graders Earn an "F" For Their 2013 Grades

By Jason Lisk

None
facebooktwitter

Draft grades are a mostly meaningless exercise, yet they are ever-present in the aftermath of the NFL Draft. They exist because they are consumed, and much like mock drafts and lists, provide easily digestible content.

But there’s a pretty simple reason why they are difficult to nail. Most picks fail in the sense that they do not provide great value. Hope springs eternal until reality hits. A great draft might produce two top starters still around in five years. Nailing which team happened to hit that can be hard.

I went back to the 2013 NFL Draft, and found this Football Outsiders summary of draft grades. It’s been five years since that decidedly mediocre draft, and I think it’s fair to look back now since many of the players are no longer with the teams that drafted them.

I used the Approximate Value and, using the method I detailed here last week about creating a draft value chart based on wins added, converted each team’s draft slots to actual and expected wins added in the 2013 draft.

The consensus top 5 draft grades went to San Francisco, Cincinnati, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Arizona. None of those teams are in the top 8 when we look back, with the Rams being the highest at 10th-best draft, entirely because they got Alec Ogletree with their second pick in the first round.

The bottom 5 grades went to Dallas, Cleveland, New England, Buffalo, and Washington. Cleveland and Washington both got nothing out of the draft, but New England had a decent draft considering they had no picks in the top 50 (Jamie Collins and Logan Ryan), while Dallas–dead last in the grades–was in the top 3 because of Travis Frederick, a trade down that everyone hated.

Overall, I ran the correlation coefficient between the draft grade rank in 2013 and the wins added after five years. It is +0.09, which basically means there is no correlation between where teams were graded and who got the most value.

When you account for draft capital going in, and grade on a curve, it’s even worse. Teams picking near the top should have an advantage, and those that don’t have early picks from prior trades should not get as much value. When I plug in the expected wins based on draft position, versus the actual results, the correlation between grades and wins over expectation is -0.11. Basically, once you give a few bad grades to the teams that didn’t have many top picks, the grades were more wrong than right.

According to my evaluation, here were the top drafts, grading on the curve of value versus expectation, and I list their rank (1-32) by average draft grade:

  1. Green Bay Packers – a pro bowl tackle in David Bakhtiari in the 4th, Eddie Lacy in the 2nd, Micah Hyde in the 5th, The Packers, though, got very little out of 1st round pick Datone Jones. (7th)
  2. Pittsburgh Steelers – entirely because they took the best player, Le’Veon Bell, in this draft in the 2nd round. They got nothing from anyone else. (10th)
  3. Dallas Cowboys – 4-time pro bowler Travis Frederick in the first round and Terrance Williams in the 3rd. (32nd)
  4. Chicago Bears – 3-time pro bowler Kyle Long in the first round and Jordan Mills, who has started 66 games at right tackle in the NFL, in the 5th. (25th)
  5. Houston Texans – DeAndre Hopkins in the 1st round. (9th)