Drafting Pass Catchers

The latest newsletter from KCSN's sports data scientist, Joseph Hefner

The Chiefs pass catchers last year were a patched together group of other teams cast-offs, plus Kelce. After Kelce, three of the next four receivers were all in town on one-year deals (JuJu, McKinnon, and Justin Watson). Toney and MVS were brought in this year on multi-year deals (Toney from a mid-season trade).

Obviously this worked out for the Chiefs, as we won our second Super Bowl in 5 years. Nevertheless, many Chiefs fans would prefer to not go into the 2023 season with a similar or worse set of pass catchers. Free agent wide receivers are headlined by JuJu, so you know it’s not a great class. The TE market is a bit better (and I hope we dip into that!), but we’re very likely to go into the draft needing some players to catch passes from Mahomes.

That’s good for me, because I’ve been working on draft outcomes and curves for various positions. When you should draft players from certain positions, what the median expectations for players drafted in certain rounds should be, and where those match up against other positions (i.e. opportunity cost. If you draft a TE at 31, you’ve lost the opportunity of drafting a DE there).

Without further ado, here’s the graphic for tight ends and wide receivers. The blue line is the position in question. The gray lines are all the other possible positions. The lines are all smoothed averages based on the total Approximate Value of players first four years (rookie contract) of all players drafted in those slots.