The Three-Peat Draft

The latest newsletter from KCSN Sports Data Scientist, Joseph Hefner

Another April has come and gone, and with it, another NFL draft. Every year, fans of every team believe their team had the absolute best draft, and nabbed so many immediate contributors. Every year, most of those fans are wrong. They’ve drunk the koolaid and no longer have any objectivity. “Fan” is short for “fanatic” after all, and fanatics are nothing if not irrational!

Every year—well, every year since BJ hired me last year—I do an analysis of our draft by comparing it to the consensus board. You can find last years analysis here. I will be the first to admit that Rashee Rice wildly exceeded my expectations of his on-field talent. Chamarri Conner also performed admirably, considering his incredibly low consensus board rank.

Veach absolutely seems to have a knack for grabbing mid to late round defensive backs, and Dave Merritt, our Defensive Backs coach, seems to be incredible at coaching them up to play in Spags scheme. That bodes well for our 6^th round pick, Kamal Hadden. Hopefully he continues the streak of late round cornerbacks being able to earn starter reps on our defense.

Let’s talk about the consensus boards for a minute. At this point, there are several. Arif Hasan is one of the pioneers of these boards. Jack Lichtenstein also has one, as does Mock Draft Database. These consensus boards take the big boards from many different analysts and websites (Daniel Jeremiah, Mel Kiper, Lance Zierlein, PFF, etc.) and average out the rankings.

That gives us a good idea of what range a player is likely to be drafted in, which can help teams to plan out their draft strategies. The idea is that you should generally take players close to their consensus board rankings. If you take a player higher than their ranking, you are “reaching” for them. The higher you take them, the bigger the reach. Again, this is very useful for draft strategy, but shouldn’t be an absolute rule. A bit of a reach is fine.

On the other side of things, “steals” are when a team drafts a player that is “falling”, when a player is taken significantly after their draft ranking. Jaden Hicks is an example this year. He was the 67^th ranked player on Arif Hasan’s Consensus Board, but Veach picked him at pick 133. He fell 66 whole picks before Veach nabbed him. That means we got a player with second round talent in the fourth round. Very exciting!!

However, players typically fall for reasons the media has no access to, such as medicals or character issues. That means they can be a gamble. The talent is undeniable, but there is more risk inherent in that player than in others. This means we should temper our expectations a bit for massive steals. Small steals are less risky, and more likely due to a handful of teams having other needs that picked right before us.