Hogs Haven
Before the draft, I did a look back at recent drafts in San Francisco to see if there might be anything we could glean from the team’s Top 30 visits with college prospects to identify who they might take in the draft. The intention was to see if Adam Peters might apply a similar methodology in DC.
In the two years I looked at, 2022 and 2023, the 49ers drafted 56% and 44% of the players they had conducted Top 30 visits with, respectively.
My conclusion, based on a review of the data was below:
Given Peters’ past history, I fully expect several of Washington’s draft picks to come from this list this year, including - almost certainly - one of the quarterbacks.
What other positions might they take? Well, with four tackles on that list, that’s probably a safe bet. EDGE, with four visits as well, and cornerback, with three visits, are also very likely targets. Tight end and linebacker, with two visits apiece, could be in the mix too.
There’s a distinct absence of interior offensive linemen, safeties, wide receivers, running backs, and interior defensive linemen, so I’d expect those positions to be low priorities in the draft unless a surprising value falls to Washington at one of their draft slots.
So, I pulled the data from this year’s class, and it’s a bit less definitive on the Top 30 front, so I decided to include some other metrics as well. In this year’s class, only 3 of 9 of Peters’ draft picks had Top 30 visits: Jayden Daniels, Brandon Coleman, and Javontae Jean-Baptiste.
In the table above, you can see that while relatively few draftees had Top 30 visits with the team, most of them (66%) had at least three visits in the pre-draft period with the team. That said, that was a low bar to cross, with the team holding hundreds of meeting in total.
Perhaps the single best predictor of whether a player was going to be drafted by Washington was whether he was team captain in college. Fully 7 of 9 (78%) of the players drafted had been captains.
All of the players had at least four years in college, and all - except two (Newton and Sinnott) - were 23 at the time of the draft. Curious about the age factor, I went digging around a bit on Twitter and came across the incredible matrix below.
Sorted by athletic score, Washington’s draft class displayed, by a nice margin, the best athleticism in the class, followed by the Steelers and Eagles.
Washington’s class is tied for 7th oldest in the league, and it’s interesting to see the other teams that leaned heavily into older recruits:
Not bad company to share.
Washington had the third fastest draft class, behind just the Colts and, predictably, the Dolphins.
I’ll let you spend some time with the graph as well and, if you see any...
