NFL Draft

End of the semester has led to very sporatic blogging, but summer is quickly approaching.

I just need to vent on a couple of things regarding the NFL draft that I have been hearing over and over.

1. A team's draft cannot be assessed until 1-3 years after the draft.

Why think that? Drafting decisions, like any other decisions ought to be evaluated at the time of the decision, based on the information that the agent had at the time of choice. How things turn out is of some importance, but these considerations do not factor in at the time of choice, and thus it's hard to see how the drafter can be graded by this criteria.

2. Teams get graded according to how good of prospects they drafted.

This seems reasonable at first, but it really isn't. Why not? Because teams do not have equal opportunity to draft players of the same caliber. For instance, the Raiders pick first in every round and the Bears pick second last in every round (ignoring trades for now). As such, it would be a ridiculous feat if the Bears drafted higher caliber players than the Raiders.

Instead, the grades teams receive should be scaled according to that teams draft position. In other words, it should be expected that the Raider's acquired better players than the Bears, but the grades should reflect how well a team did given their drafting position. This fact seems to be ignored in grading drafts.