HSAC Blog

Each year, immediately after the draft, a variety of media sources publish their draft grades. Basically, these grades tell the readers if the team did a good job at picking the players that were conventionally popular (because if a team picked a player that they liked, but nobody else did, that would be immediately perceived as a bad pick). Most graders admit that it is impossible to judge a team’s class immediately after the draft…yet since these columns are popular, almost every website and magazine produces post draft grades anyway.

As expected, these grades are pretty useless at predicting how good each team’s draft class will be. Grading the draft after 3 full seasons gives a more accurate assessment of each team’s personnel department.

Scouts Inc. at ESPN.com has done exactly that in this article:

http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/draft08/news/story?id=3333998

In the article, they create a composite “post-draft grade” that includes grades from ESPN, SI, Yahoo!, etc. and then they contrast these grades with a current grade based on how the players have panned out. Needless to say, there are some huge disparities.

GM A.J. Smith’s San Diego Chargers are the only team to earn an “A” today. His risky first rounds picks of Shawne Merriman and Luis Castillo turned out to be fantastic. Merriman played DE in college and some teams wondered if he could make the transition to LB. Castillo had tested positive for steroids in college. Ironically, Merriman has tested positive for steroids in the NFL–while becoming one of the top LB’s in the game…a link? We’ll save that for another article.

As you can guess, the grades don’t match up too well. To test the correlations, I converted the grades to the familiar GPA scale (A=4, A-=3.67, B+=3.33, etc.). There is a slightly positive correlation between high grades on draft day and high grades today. The slope of the line is .3, but the linear regression only accounts for 3.1% (r^2=.031) of the variation in grades. So, the draft day grades are almost useless at predicting the future grades…no surprise there.

More interestingly, the average grade awarded on draft day was a 2.85 (B/B-) while the average grade today was a 2.32 (C+). 2005 turned out to be a particularly weak class, but it is interesting that the grades on the whole were considerably higher than they should have been. It would be cool to see if this relationship holds for all years. If so, it would probably mean that the media expects too much from the draft.

So when you read those draft grades in a couple weeks, don’t get too excited if your team gets an A and don’t fret if your favorite squad gets a D. As for your grades on midterms and finals…those unfortunately are a pretty good predictors of your ultimate grade at the end of the year.

Daniel is a junior living in Lowell House. He is interested in football, and has had internships with the New England Patriots and Cleveland Browns.