With the 2018 NFL Draft approaching, I felt it would be appropriate to take a look at some of the aspects of acquiring rookies in the NFL that may be important in building a roster as a whole. This effort can be found in OTC’s new Rookie Class Evaluation section.

This section takes a look at two metrics–snap counts and vested veteran contracts–and breaks down each rookie class (including both drafted and undrafted players) based on those metrics. To learn more about the methodology behind these metrics, please read this article.

The goal of this project is to give observers of the NFL more perspective into what makes a good rookie class. In particular, observers will likely have high hopes about the new rookies that teams acquire in a couple weeks. But four years from now, we will learn that many of them will not play as much as observers may think, and most will fail to earn a contract in the NFL past their first four seasons. When this happens, a team’s efforts in building a rookie class are often seen as a failure. But in many cases, those efforts may in fact be closer to the leaguewide mean or median.

From now until the draft, I hope to put forward some more articles from the observations I’ve learned from this project. In the meantime, I encourage you to visit the Rookie Class Evaluation section. If there are any observations of your own, suggestions to improve the existing metrics or to propose additional metrics, please do not hesitate to submit those comments.