Offensive Depth in the 2023 Draft

The latest newsletter from KCSN Sports Data Scientist, Joseph Hefner.

Just how deep is the draft, really? Is it top-heavy, but falls off dramatically? Is it pretty even throughout? Does it change by position? This draft has been talked about as being a historically good draft for tight ends. Is that actually true, or are we all just prisoners of the moment?

This week’s article takes a look at those questions and tries to give the context those sorts of statements are often lacking. Let’s find out just what positions this draft is stacked in, and which positions we’d better hope we’ve already got covered on the current team.

To answer these questions, I took a look at the past 7 drafts, from 2016 through 2022. I separated them out by position, and calculated how many players were drafted in the top 100 picks for each position. I then plotted each year for each position, with both the draft picks and the positional rank for each player. 

This information can give us the context to compare this year’s draft with drafts in years past for every position in the NFL. With the previous drafts information ready, I can take a look at the consensus mock drafts from https://www.nflmockdraftdatabase.com and see where this draft is expected to stack up against the past seven years.