Acme Packing Company
When crowds are smart, and organizations are not.
Last April, Arif Hasan wrote a piece at Wide Left grading the draft boards of various draft analysts. It’s enlightening and worth checking out as we roll into the 2025 draft season, especially if you’re interested in who has been good or poor with their draft boards in the recent past.
While individual analysts’ rankings can be interesting, let’s put some focus on the consensus boards. There are a few versions out there, but generally speaking the consensus boards take many of the major individual boards and aggregate them into an average. I cite the consensus boards in almost everything I write about the draft, and there is no more useful tool for assessing which teams may be reaching –- or getting bargains. That said, there is a loud minority that is skeptical of the consensus boards and that used to yell at me on Twitter, when I was still on Twitter, about how the consensus boards knew nothing and could never approach the expertise of real NFL personnel.
It’s true that the NFL’s access to prospects does convey a real advantage, especially in assessing character and off-field issues, but it’s also worth noting that the Draft Industrial Complex is pretty good in its own right. Anyone who has ever read Dane Brugler’s “The Beast” will quickly find themselves in awe at the level of detail that Brugler goes into on each prospect. The Beast is 519 pages long, and you will find as much detail about the family environment and the high school experience of his 37th ranked receiver as you will about his top quarterback. Dane Brugler is as much an expert as any individual in existence, team affiliated or not.
Brugler is the most high-profile (and I would argue, most accomplished) expert out there, but he’s hardly alone. There are hundreds of people willing to devote their time and expertise to draft analysis every year, each with their own specialties and levels of expertise, which brings us to the next big advantage of the consensus board: the intellectual diversity of those contributing. Someone with a background in offensive line play will have distinct expertise from someone who has worked more with the skill positions. Spreadsheet jockeys like myself will have a different focus than the tape grinders. People willing to pore over hundreds or thousands of mock drafts will have a different view (and yes, different built-in biases) to their rankings than someone who is more concerned with maintaining an objective baseline free from the influence of mock drafts.
The consensus boards will capture the flaws in all of these approaches, but they will also capture the combined expertise of everyone involved, and in the end, the consensus board does tend to make better overall predictions than any one individual on a yearly basis. Arif concluded his rankings with the consensus board itself:
*“In total board performance — the consensus board ranks anywhere between 700 and 1200 players...
