With the NFL season winding down I wanted to take a look at see what teams are getting the most contributions from players that they drafted and/or originally signed as undrafted free agents over the last four seasons. For this I am only looking at players who played offensive or defensive snaps with the snaps coming from their original team. Here is the breakdown of snaps:

The NFL average this year was about 9,700 snaps played. The team with the fewest snaps played by their own young players was the Cardinals with just 7,174 snaps while the team with the most was the Packers with over 13,000 snaps coming from their own young players.  

While snaps don’t necessarily mean a good player and in many cases may just be snaps being filled due to injury or poor roster construction it does at least show the type of commitment a team has made to trying to improve by building around their own scouting and amassing draft selections. It should give some hope to bad teams for the future since they have young players gaining experience and at least seem to have some pipeline for the future.

The teams at the peak of this list would be the Packers, Rams, Bucs, Colts, Commanders, Bears, Cowboys, Chiefs, Chargers, and Lions. Clearly not all of these teams are good (a few are downright bad) but if they can continue to get young players like this contributing they have a chance to get better and/or at least maintain their status if they are already a good team.

The teams at the bottom of the list would be more alarming unless they are simply missing snaps due to a rash of injuries. Arizona has been a mess for years and their new front office and staff have a lot of snaps to find in the near future for their team to avoid having to keep signing guys to one year deals in free agency. Miami is clearly all in this year and is doing it with a lot of veterans and free agent players. As for the future?  They need to hope those veterans keep playing well. The Raiders, Panthers, and Steelers are next among the troubled teams and its fair to say that the Steelers, Texans, 49ers, and Broncos have not gotten much out of their last few years of classes.

In looking a little closer at the numbers I thought that the most interesting aspect was how teams are performing when we focus on players selected from 2020 to 2022. Why did I look at this time period?  First year players don’t often perform at a very high level as a rookie season usually carries a learning curve with it and you also don’t necessarily get merit based snaps. While some of that also carries over to players selected in 2022 usually by the mid point of the year teams have adjusted their use of those players who are underperforming the draft slot.

Here is a breakdown of snaps from players selected between 2020-2022.

Here is how this looks against the teams record this year.

I also wanted to break the data into quartiles, looking at snaps with and without UDFA’s.

I don’t think any of the numbers here are exactly significant in any statistical way but I do find them interesting and I think helps illustrate the importance that comes from finding a minimum level of contribution from every year’s draft class and not falling into the trap where we abandon the drafts due to excessive trading or refusing to give young players opportunities once a season is basically boiling down to chasing the 7^th wildcard spot.