With the NFL draft rapidly approaching I thought it would be a good time to do our look at where teams are hitting on good players in the draft and where we can often find high quality talent in free agency. Using those two numbers gives a strong indication of ways to approach the draft using a positional based valuation approach rather than the pure “he’s the highest graded player on the board” approach. I guess this is a bit more timely since a NFL GM recently said “throw positional value out” when talking about this years NFL draft.

One of the first things that we should be doing when we are building a team is determing the best overall ways to construct a team. Primarily teams build through the draft and free agency so how can we use those to our advantage?  What I wanted to do was take a look at the top paid players at each position in the NFL to see what we can gather from somewhat recent history. Here is where each of the top 10 players were drafted:

While these don’t indicate “hit rates” (for example far more QBs are drafted early than tight ends) they do give us a baseline to consider when planning strategies around positional adjusted rankings of players, which is something that I don’t feel is done enough in the NFL. While a 10 player sample is small it does give me some idea that drafting Corners, EDGE, Offensive Tackles, Wide Receivers, and potentially D-line in round 1 is probably a far better use than on other positions, even when those positions supposedly have a “cant miss unicorn”. Enough good talent is there to find if a team is patient enough.

What about if we expand it to the top 20? That is probably a more realistic representation of finding good quality players in the draft than just the top 10 alone.

I think here we definitely get into the concept of drafting QB, following by our defensive line and finally left tackle as our premium options. Those are followed by WR, CB, and RT. Positions like center, tight end, and safety in particular really see a number of really good players land in the latter half of the draft making it much harder to justify an early selection on those players.

These numbers are important because building the best team is not the same simply drafting the best player with your first pick. A team will most likely be better off landing the 5^th best EDGE in round 1, 15th best wide receiver in round 2, and 15^th best tight end in round 3 and still having a chance at finding some other starters, than landing the overall top tight end in round 1, 7^th best linebacker in round 2, 18^th best EDGE in round 3 and then having limited chances at finding starters later on. 

Coupling this information with free agent availability is also critical.  Why?  The second avenue to team building is free agency. What positions are actually available in free agency with high quality players?  Let’s break it down for the top 20 salaries in the league and who was available in free agency.

These numbers really should be giving us some strong guidance. While there may be a great grading off ball linebacker available in the draft, wouldn’t I be better off as a GM to simply sign a top 5 linebacker in free agency and draft a good left tackle even if he grades a bit lower than taking that linebacker in the draft and signing the 18^th best left tackle? I would think so.

The numbers also show you what positions are more of a 6 to 8 year return (the days of expecting a decade out of most positions is simply not realistic anymore) from a draft versus just a four year return where I lose the player in free agency. In addition every team benefits on the cap if they land an expensive position in the draft versus a less expensive one.

If we plot the free agent availability against the players from round 1 that became top 20 players it really solidifies what positions to strongly consider in round 1 and what ones to avoid.

We can also start looking at the growth from round 1 to the end of round 3 to also classify some ideas of what to do in rounds 2 and 3.

We do start to see some shifts here but the important thing to me is that basically our WR and Interior D-Line pool is gone by this point. Really it gives these positions added value if you are really missing at these positions or did not draft there in round 1. These rounds are also where you can begin to consider guards, right tackles, running backs and linebackers as teams do a better job of identifying the stars by this point. Ultimately if you draft the proper positions and then use the money you have to go and buy the top players at the available positions you should create a far superior team to the one drafting the wrong positions and then overpaying for lower quality free agents at the more expensive positions.

As for the original point made by the GM that this draft is different, I have studied a lot of drafts in the NFL. Quite honestly they never are that different in terms of providing starting level talent, outside of the QB position. Maybe the scouts see them differently but in the end they almost always produce relatively consistent numbers. The only draft I can really think of where it wasn’t the case was 2013. Maybe 2026 will be like that draft but weve heard the stories before about major drop offs after 15 players and lack of studs at the top and 95% of the time the drafts simply produce talented players in the NFL at every position.