Windy City Gridiron
My impression as a fan is that the first draft class of general manager Ryan Poles is mildly disappointing. How does this class compare to the historical performance markers available to us?
So, one of the side effects of having just completed a massive project looking at a decade of outcomes for players taken in the NFL draft is that those spreadsheets are still there when the project is published. For some of us, that means that it makes sense to do something with that data. And it supposedly takes three years to evaluate a draft class. And it’s been three years since the 2022 NFL draft.
By far the most straightforward way of approaching all of this is to get a “ballpark” guess on how well Ryan Poles did. Taking each of the drafted players taken at a given spot (for example, pick #71) across all 10 years under study and prorating the results to 60% to acknowledge that every player still has two remaining years of playing time should at least tell me in general if Poles was a dramatic failure or success in some regard. To be honest, because he made three picks in Round 7 and some of those were at places where a player wasn’t always recorded in the Draft Research Project charts, I simply expected the same of all Round 7 players averaged at the three places he drafted.
This sort of airport napkin math tells me that Ryan Poles should have already managed to get 253 games and 131 starts out of the eleven players he selected in 2022. He did not. Instead, his players contributed 344 games and 143 starts. That means that he got ahead by 91 games and 12 starts. It’s tempting to say that the disparity is because those players were drafted to a bad team with roster holes, but I am using the positional reference points of other players drafted to teams in roughly the 7th position in the draft.
This is the sort of jarring result that made me want to add performance numbers to players whenever possible, so it seems important to break down the players one-by-one instead of looking at just time on the field. Along the way, I will offer the traditional “grades” for each player as informed by this data.
Adjusted for being only three seasons into the first five years, if Kyler Gordon had been a first-round pick at cornerback, he should be on track for 34 games, 26 starts, and 27 DVDs at 60% value for his first five years. The median values (instead of mean values) would ask for 36 games, 27 starts, and 28 DVDs. Instead, Gordon has already played in 42 games and made 34 starts, and he has recorded 27.5 DVDs. Of particular note, if he were a median first-round corner by this point he should have 4 interceptions (or 3 if you prefer to compare him to the mean). He...
