Windy City Gridiron
Debating about sports is fun!
My Windy City Gridiron colleague Bill Zimmerman and I had a disagreement on X/Twitter yesterday over whether Ryan Poles is a bad post-second-round talent evaluator and drafter. In case you missed it, the Chicago Bears extended Poles’ contract through the 2029 season, aligning him with head coach Ben Johnson.
First, the Tweet that sparked our debate:
Editor: You can head over to Twitter for Bill’s side of things.
Bill described Poles’ record outside of the second round as “dreadful” – but is it really? Bill would go on in the thread to argue that Poles’ record outside of the 2nd round doesn’t compare well with his predecessor, Ryan Pace, who many consider to be a “bad” GM. I’m not sure that’s an apples-to-apples comparison, given the fact that the reasons Pace is criticized for his Bears tenure have not, to my knowledge, featured his Day 3 picks, but rather his tendency to expend draft capital to move up in the draft for a targeted player, his failure at drafting a franchise QB, and his poor management of the Bears cap. Further, we have the full measure of Pace’s drafts, while Ryan Poles’ earliest draft classes are just now maturing, making comparing the two directly somewhat problematic. But let’s put that aside for the moment, as there is a more fundamental question at hand: what should we expect the hit rate for Day 3 picks for a GM to be in the NFL? What would be performing above average, average, or as Bill described it, dreadful?
PFF did a study focused on positional hit rates in the NFL draft, but they also looked at the overall hit rate per round. This is their graph depicting hit rate as a function of NFL snaps by the player, covering the seasons from 2006-2021:
As we can see, from pick 65 to pick 100 (roughly the 3rd round), the hit rate goes from about 30% to 10% - so for just the third round – the hit rate is, on average, 20%. After that the hit rate plateaus, but falls to near zero by pick 250. So, let’s do some back of the envelope calculations to see if we can get an average hit rate for Day 3. We will assign the following hit rates for each round:
3rd round: 25%
4th round: 10%
5th round: 5%
6th and 7th rounds: 1%.
That’s an 8.4% hit rate for Day 3.
Now let’s look at Poles draft picks in those rounds – we won’t be able to use the PFF definition since it uses four seasons of data, and we don’t have four seasons yet for any of the Poles Day 3 draft picks and assign hit or miss for the pick. We will necessarily exclude this year as those players haven’t played at all in the NFL. If the player has played meaningful snaps in the NFL, we will call them a hit. If they have barely played, or...
