Windy City Gridiron
The NFL Draft is one of my favorite parts of being a football fan, and evaluating it has become a treasured past time of mine.
As loyalists to Windy City Gridiron may know, I have been covering the NFL Draft on this website since 2017, often with a Bears slant. For those newer to the site or for those who have no idea who I am, you can understand that growing up a Bears fan would make someone particularly interested in the draft.
I’m hardly a professional scout, and there are people for whom talent evaluation is a full-time job. Those people do a lot more prep work than me and probably know a lot more than me, too. I’m just a guy who likes to watch football in his free time, and after picking up bits and pieces along the way, some people come to enjoy my analysis.
All this to say, draft evaluation should be a constantly evolving process. Nobody hits on 100% of their evaluations. Hell, if we’re being realistic, nobody hits on 50% of their evaluations. That said, you can try to minimize those mistakes by learning from the past.
I wanted to put together a quantifiable number on how accurate or inaccurate my draft analysis actually is. Not only does this provide some public accountability, but it also helps me see which evaluations I’ve aced and which ones I bombed.
For the sake of this argument, I will be using Pro Football Reference’s Absolute Value statistic. To me, it’s the best quantifiable, individual statistic that measures a player’s value of play each year.
To put together these differentials, I put all 178 rookies who ended the year with an Absolute Value score of 1 or above, and I compared them to my top 75 prospects in my final big board. I calculated the absolute value of PFR’s AV minus the ranking on my board.
The lower the differential, the more accurate my big board’s ranking was in terms of how they performed in Year 1. There were a few players who didn’t tally an Absolute Value score — most of whom having dealt with serious injuries their first year — so their differential grade would be 179 (the absolute value of 179-0=179, and since there were 178 rookies with AV scores, all players with an AV score of 0 tied for 179th in the league).
Just as all sports statistics are, it’s not a perfect system. This doesn’t account as much for missed time due to injury. For the sake of one specific season, one could argue that AV earned per game would be a better scale. However, the cliche goes that the best ability is availability, and just as consistent injury issues would affect a player’s value, so too do injuries in this differential equation.
If you want to rank the entire 2024 NFL Draft class by Absolute Value, use the link I provided above and sort by wAV. If enough people are interested,...
