Every year, NFL teams spend enormous amounts of time, money, and effort trying to identify the best players in the draft.
High draft picks are considered valuable assets, and teams often trade multiple selections to move up and secure a player they believe will become a star.
But a new study suggests that the NFL may be placing too much value on early draft positions.
Researchers at The Ohio State University analyzed 10 years of NFL draft data and found that players selected earlier in the draft often did not perform significantly better than players chosen later, especially when comparing athletes picked within the same round.
The findings challenge a long-held belief in professional football that higher draft picks are consistently more valuable and more likely to produce better players.
The NFL draft consists of seven rounds. Teams with poorer records pick earlier, while stronger teams select later. Conventional wisdom assumes that earlier picks should be worth much more because they provide access to the most talented players.
However, the new study found that reality is often more complicated.
Researchers examined data from every NFL player drafted between 2011 and 2020, creating a sample of 2,544 players.
They collected draft position information and compared it with player performance during the first four years of each athlete’s NFL career.
To measure performance, the team used player grades from Pro Football Focus, a widely used football analytics service. They also compared performance with rookie salaries and draft value charts, which NFL teams use when negotiating draft-day trades.
The results showed that the connection between draft position and future performance was weaker than many people assume.
In particular, draft position had little relationship to actual performance or career length for players selected in the fourth and fifth rounds. Even in earlier rounds, higher selections often failed to justify the large differences in value assigned to them.
One of the study’s most surprising findings involved draft-day trades.
Teams frequently trade up in the draft, giving away multiple picks to move into a higher position. Yet the analysis found that teams trading down and collecting additional draft picks generally gained a performance advantage over teams that traded up.
This suggests that accumulating more opportunities to select players may be more beneficial than spending heavily on a single highly ranked prospect.
According to lead author Dennis Shaffer, a professor of psychology at Ohio State, draft decisions are influenced by many subjective factors. Different teams value players differently based on their strategies, needs, and scouting evaluations.
As a result, predicting future success remains extremely difficult.
The study does not claim that draft position is meaningless. Higher picks still tend to receive larger contracts and more opportunities. However, the findings suggest that the gap in talent between players is often much smaller than the NFL’s valuation system implies.
There is also encouraging news for players selected later in the draft. Although lower picks typically earn less money initially, their long-term careers can be just as successful as those of higher-selected players. Strong performance and longevity can eventually lead to larger earnings than those of some players drafted ahead of them.
The researchers believe NFL teams may benefit from rethinking how they value draft picks and trades. Instead of relying heavily on traditional draft value charts based on past trades, teams may achieve better results by using methods that more closely reflect actual player outcomes.
In other words, when it comes to the NFL draft, bigger draft numbers do not always translate into better football players.
