NFL fans are in love with the NFL Draft and there are literally dozens of pundits who make a living or are trying to make a living analyzing the crop of athletes who are draft eligible every season.
So let me start with my only NFL Draft Prediction: There are zero NFL Draft pundits out there who possess more than a few true insights into the talent in the upcoming NFL Draft. Nor do fans opinions carry any value. The only persons on this planet whose conclusions matter are NFL Scouts and even they have a 50% batting average at best but considering the complexity of the task, 50% is extraordinary.
The bottom line: Draft pundits are full of shit and I will explain why in the blog. Read on...
In a quotation that could have easily come from Yogi Berra, Nobel Prize winning Physicist Neils Bohr once said "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it is about the future"
Truer words have never been spoken. Let's use this insight to analyze the complexity of predicting which NCAA athletes might succeed in the National Football League.
Fun facts about football players:
- There are over 11,000 athletes who dress for a Division I NCAA College Football Team in a given season
- There are less than 2,000 athletes on NFL rosters, many of them are multi year veterans.
- In a typical season, a few hundred rookies make a regular season NFL roster or practice squad.
- There are thousands more athletes playing college football in Division II, Division III, NAIA and JUCO.
- Of the thousands of NCAA Division I athletes who are eligible to be drafted in a given season, only about 300 athletes get invited every year to the NFL Scouting Combine.
- Less than 2% of Division I NCAA football players will take so much as a single snap in an NFL regular season game.
So the task of predicting who at the college level will succeed in the NFL comes down to predicting which athletes are in top 2%.
Let's compare choosing NFL players to a task of similar complexity that we might all relate to: Academics:
Baldwin Wallace University, which ironically sits in the shadow of the Cleveland Browns Headquarters, has about 11,000 students, a number on par with the number of Division I football players. How difficult would it be to predict which incoming Freshmen at Baldwin Wallace are going to be end up graduating and in the top 2% of their college class?
Pretty damn hard.
We all know that SAT or ACT scores might help us filter out 80% of the candidates. But can you look at an SAT score and predict desire, discipline and toughness?
Of course not. And that my friends is why Draft Pundits are full of shit. The vast majority of NFL Draft pundits are watching film. Some pundits have contacts that they can inquire with about factors like discipline and character but no one pundit has the time to cover every candidate at that level of depth. Most NFL teams employ dozens of scouts. That’s the level of scale required.
Are there extraordinary athletes who are so good that watching film is enough to predict their success? Of course, there are a dozen or so of those every year but consider that most often success in the NFL comes down to far more factors that what an athlete puts on film:
Facts:
- No single draft pundit is speaking to all these athletes.
- No one draft pundit is talking to all their coaches, friends and family.
To determine the top 2% of any future performance is extraordinarily complex. To have any chance of accuracy of predicting a potential NFL players success above an accuracy rate of 10% you need to measure far more than film, 40 yard dash times and bench presses. You need to understand desire, discipline, toughness, and many other factors.
Only NFL teams staffed with dozens of NFL Scouts have that comprehensive a view and I do believe that there are NFL teams that are good at scouting college players, some are great at scouting potential NFL players and some are even terrible. Those NFL teams like the Browns who have invested in data and are good at eliminating bias from their process are the ones really hitting home runs, though a wise person might recommend to the Browns they start holding onto their first round picks... In spite of trading many first rounders, the Browns still hit the jackpot in later rounds these last few years with home runs like Dawand Jones and Martin Emerson. That's no accident folks.
So I don't want to diminish how fun the NFL Draft is but when you pay your hard earned dollar to read a pundit's Draft Guide, just remember, that pundit is full of shit.
Enjoy the 2024 NFL Draft!
