2024 NFL Draft Analytical Big Board

Leveraging what evaluators do well, and enhancing it with analytics, via positional and surplus value

QBs with “starter traits” are very much worth first-round picks. Credit: AP

Every March and April I get progressively confused, angry and dismissive of NFL draft media "Big Boards”, rankings and pointless thought-exercises. Most of the draft analysts producing these boards and rankings do a fantastic job with their core competency: evaluating college prospects. I wouldn’t dare to attempt digging through hours of tape and formulating how good of a player each prospect will be in the NFL.

Perhaps I could refine the grading process by identifying and systematically countering various biases, or figure out a way to quantify traits for easier comparison and memory retention. But I would only be making changes to the results on the edges. Draft evaluators are very good at rank ordering players within their position, as indicated by the strong correlations between prospect draft positions and NFL success.

What frustrates me isn’t the individual prospect grading, but the process of aggregating all the non-specialist positions into one list, either titled as a “Big Board” or simply “Prospect Rankings”. It’s fine to say that Brock Bowers is more likely to be an elite tight end than Drake Maye an elite quarterback, but does that mean you’d follow some rankings and draft the former first, knowing the vast difference in value their respective positions bring to their teams? I’d hope not. But the rankings and Big Boards out there usually aren’t explicit in their application. If you rank a player in the top-5, but wouldn’t draft them at that position, what exactly is the point of your inter-positional rankings?

There are some obvious answers. People like to see a list of all the players together much more than position-specific rankings, so that’s what you give them. Less cynically, some draft analysts in the media might actually believe that you should be position-agnostic when building a draft board, and then draft accordingly. Yes, it’s an antiquated way to think, pushing against ever-increasing mounds of evidence, but a decision-maker like Dave Gettleman was running an NFL front office just three years ago. We haven’t made it completely out of the analytical dark ages, though there are signs of an shift with the hiring of younger general managers across the NFL.

Rather than continuing to complain on social media about what others are doing, I decided to build my own Big Board for the 2023 NFL draft, leveraging the outstanding prospect grades from Sports Info Solutions (SIS), which you can find on the 33rd Team draft website. What I’m doing here is combining the best of the prospect-grading world, with analytical concepts of NFL value and surplus value based on position, which has been a big focus of my own research.

I ranked the top-100 players by projected NFL value, which I define as the equivalent salary you’d expect for a second contract, based on the number grading from SIS, which comes with a description for each grade cohort. I then weigh the projected NFL value in annual per year contract (APY) against the designated contract costs for each draft slot for the first four years of a player’s career. No matter the contract cost, teams want to draft players with the highest projected NFL value. But the costs decline significantly by draft position, greatly affecting the cost-including values to NFL teams. The player selected 11th makes roughly half of the No. 1 pick in the draft.

I determined the NFL values by position using a mix of art and science. The science part was looking at the expected percentage of cap value curves for each position, illustrated below. The art part is using the descriptive definitions of the SIS grading (e.g. “Solid Starter”) and marrying them with the current contract values by position at OverTheCap.com.

I like how the analysis played out using these combined values, but there are still ways beyond the scope of what I have done to further improve the process. Some ideas I have that would likely help, but require a lot more time and complication:

• Turning the NFL value projections into ranges of outcomes, instead of a single NFL value number. For some draft slots and positions we care more about the ceiling than the floor, and every prospect represents a distribution of potential.

• Aggregating and scaling multiple grading scales to get a “wisdom of crowds” NFL projection , rather than rely solely on SIS.

• Projecting based on my value metric of NFL Plus/Minus and translating back to dollar-based value, rather looking backwards on what players have been paid.

I’ll work on incorporating this stuff in the future, but I think we get 90% of the way towards making a superior Big Board in the rankings detailed below.

Each table includes: the updated, position-adjusted player rankings (“Adj Rank”), the traditional rankings based on grades (“Trad Rank”), the player names and positions, the SIS grade and its description, the contract value you would expect for a player at that position of that grade (“NFL Value”), the designated annual contract amount for the draft selection (“Contract”), and the annual surplus value the drafting team would get from selecting the player (“Surplus”). The last three value numbers are all based in millions of dollars.

THE NEW TOP-10 PROSPECTS OF 2024