Last week, I quantifiably determined how well Buffalo Bills director of football operations/general manager Brandon Beane has drafted. Then, I compared Beane’s drafts to some of his decision-making contemporaries.
The original piece in this study can be found here, with full/detailed methodology as to how I conducted the research.
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And here’s the TL;DR of what I did:
I used 15 years of recent draft data to find expected Weighted Approximate Value (wAV), which is a Pro Football Reference measure of how good a player has been in the NFL, for every draft pick number and then compared that to the actual wAV for every player to get a “residual” for every pick made in the 2018 – 2023 time frame.
Because I was already six teams into my research after Part II, I decided to find the residual results for the entire NFL.
Here are all 32 teams sorted by Total Residual, which is straightforwardly a sum of the residuals of each selection every club made in the 2018 – 2023 window. Of course, teams that made more picks were at an advantage here (and rightfully so, because the more rolls at the table, the better.)
Takeaways:
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The Ravens and Bills at the top should come as no surprise, given each club’s perennial contender status in the AFC
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The 49ers score is significantly boosted by the Brock Purdy selection, which of course, as Mr. Irrelevant, came with the lowest expected wAV. And he’s become a higher-end quarterback.
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The Chiefs at No. 4 immediately after the selection of Patrick Mahomes in 2017 helps tell the story as to how they were able to win three Super Bowls in five years.
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Ironically, despite being squarely in the “F Them Picks” era, the Rams made the most selections (59) in the 2018 – 2013 time frame.
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The Texans and Chargers advancing to the postseason the past few seasons despite their recent drafting struggles is pretty absurd.
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And here are all 32 teams ranked by Residual Per Pick, which straightforwardly is each club’s total residual divided by the amount of picks they made between 2018 – 2023. Essentially it can serve as the “average” residual of their selections in that time frame.
For context on the expected wAV for each pick in this study, I won’t overload your screen with a rundown of all 250-plus selections in the draft. I can tell you that the expected wAV for the No. 1 overall pick is roughly 58, the No. 10 overall pick is right around 32, the No. 20 overall pick is 22, and the last pick in the first round is 14.
And here is wAV mapped into tiers:
I present these tiers again (they debuted in Part I of the study) for obvious perspective and because of a misnomer they address.
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Intuitively, it’s easy to assume the expected performance (expected wAV) for every first-round pick is really good — heck, I did myself. But that is not how the players at those picks have performed. Naturally, the expected range is highest at No. 1 overall then quite sharply declines outside the Top 3, Top 5, Top 10, and so on, until late in the the first round, when the expected performance for one of the final picks there is right on the cusp of “backup / rotational player” and “average starter for several years.”
(of course, after that, into the second round and beyond, the “expectations” continue to decrease)
I felt it critical to include that specific example because it reframes the expectations for mid-to-late first-round picks that tend to carry the same expectations as earlier first-round picks simply because they’re selections grouped into the opening round of the draft.
Now you know how well all NFL teams have recently drafted.
