Draft pick values

I'd love to see the whole paper because it seems to coincide with my thoughts on one area at least - the salaries paid to first-round draft picks are getting ridiculous.

Off the top of my head, the Texans gave Mario Williams something like $26m in guaranteed money. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't heard of such an outrageous guarantee since Broadway Joe's!

If Super Mario is just Okay Mario the Texans are royally shafted. I also think that bad players taken in the first round are given much, much longer to prove themselves because teams are terrified to cut them or simply unable to for salary cap reasons.

The flipside is the lack of time given to late-rounders. Brooks Bollinger posted figures every bit as good as many former first-round draft picks managed in their first seasons as starters, yet he is not even being considered as a potential quality starter by many. If a first-rounder had posted those figures people would be talking about his potential and the probability of improvement in his second year as a starter - and he would certainly be back starting next season.

The higher the pick, the more a team is tied into that player regardless of actual performance, and the more a failure hurts.

 

This is a bad argument, it seems to focus on a football team more as a business. I don't think you can apply the logic to football, it seems more suited for something like betting on horse races. The bottomline is that you want to make a team better, and you have a better chance with getting players that are perceived to be better with higher picks. Of course its a bad idea putting lots of money in unproven commodities....but you would still have reggie bush over leon washington wouldn't you?

In the interests of winning games/championships, it would make more sense to cultivate and play the player that has the best chance reaching there potential; this goal has nothing to do with money and everything to do winning superbowls.

Certainly a strange way of looking at the issue....do you have the link?

 

You're right of course, and everyone gets excited over first-round picks, but in your own words you are only getting the players that are perceived to be better with those higher picks. The truth takes time to come out and a bust in the first round is far more painful than a bust in the fourth or fifth.

If there was no salary cap it wouldn't matter as much because you could just shrug your shoulders, cut that player and move on.

 

I certainly think the article goes too far, but the top picks do get too much guaranteed money. I have long believed that the best value is from around pick 12 to the middle of the second round. These are players that are paid moderately and are likely to be good contributors.

 

Put a different way, would you take 1 first rounder at $3M/Yr or take 15 late rounders at $200K/yr? If you take the 15 late rounders you could work them out a bit and keep the 4 or 5 "good ones" and still be paying only 1/3 what you would pay the 1st rounder.

 

While I didn't read the paper itself, is this economic analysis more akin to the chicken vs. egg debate? By that, I mean, are high draft picks risky because human performance is so unpredictable or are they risky because high draft picks tend to be chosen by bad teams that are stupid and make bad personnel decisions? If you dropped a poor-drafting team lower in the order and supplied it with more picks, would its problems only be exacerbated in that it has a bunch of bad, cheap players vs. a couple bad, expensive players?

I don't have statistical analysis to back up my claim, but here's an anecdote. If you look at a team like the Steelers, they tend to have picks at the tail-end of every round, but they choose players that play well (Faneca - #26 in 1998, Miller - #30 in 2005). When they picked higher in 2003 and 2004, they drafted well (Polamalu @ 16, Roethlisberger @ #11). Detroit, on the other hand, failed at #3 with Harrington (2002), they struck out on Charlie Rogers (#2 in 2003), but they also didn't light it up in 2001 (Jeff Backus @#18) or Stockar McDougle (#20 in 2000).

The Eagles are another team recently that has done a good job drafting year after year. I'm not sure I put the Pats in the same league as the Steelers and Eagles (they've done a better job of fitting in cheap free agents than drafting stars, Brady aside).

I guess I would throw this back at the group: Is the risk/reward of a player's draft position a function of the acumen of personnel experts making the picks? If so, isn't the return potential at the top of the draft just as good or better if you know what you're doing?

 

Good point - Pats have been overrated with their draft success - this is why Mangini is out to improve on the system he was brought up on. They are very adept in fitting in free agents into their system that makes them very successful.

 

Bottom Line you live and die by your scouts. If you are picking high in a draft there is obvious more pressure on your team because A. your team had a losing season and B. You get to chose any player in the draft who you feel will be the best for your team.

From a Financial standpoint there are always going to be guys later in the draft that you don't have to pay as much that could suprise, but if you have the opportunity to get the best player on your board how do you not pull the trigger?

Any player can bust. Trust your scouts and hope it pans out.

 

I can argue this both ways.

Good teams might be good because even though they don't draft as high, they might be drafting better and that's why there good. It might not be tied to money at all, it might be talent evaluation?

The lottery element. The Bengals and the Colts stunk for years and drafted high for years but 1 year they drafted high when Manning and Palmer were available and it turned them around. Another words it matters when your drafting high.

The other side of the argument. I heard Ernie Accorsi in an interview last year after he "over paid" for K-Mack. What he said was we wanted Eli we gave up some top picks but those picks would be expensive so in a way we used money that would have gone to high draft picks and signed proven commodities instead. Basically he considers K-Mack, Burress and now Harrington replacements for the 1st round picks he gave up. Not a bad haul.

 

This article also doesn't take into consideration that roster spots and positions on the field are limited. For example, say you have a 1st round MLB with 50 % chance of reaching his potential as compared to 5 Undrafted FA MLB's with 10 % chance of being successful. Who would you rather put on the field to see if they can handle the pressure? You try the guy you think has a better chance to do well on the field, its bad time management to choose trying to experiment with all 5 Undrafted FA MLB's just b/c you save money, since you lose time giving each LB a chance to succeed.

It's one thing to manage the salary cap, its another to start lesser ranked talent just because if he pans out he's cheaper. Not to mention the fact that if the cheaply paid guy plays well for 2+ years he's going to want a new contract aka the 'javon walker' theory....

 

Now the premise of that article is wrong,

If the 1st round pick is worth 3000 points, and the 255th pick is worth 0.45 (use the NFL draft value chart), your "point value per dollar" ratio will be greater with the 255th pick.

Mario williams got 6 years, 54M, so an average of 9M a year. Even at his Rookie figure of around 3.1M, it's 0.96 points per 1K earned. Using the average, it's 0.33 points per 1 K earned

Now for the 255th player, let's assume he's going to earn 230K, the minimum. That's 0.002 points per 1K earned.

The #1 overall pick has more value per dollar.

 

Smartest thread ever. Now let me dumb it down a bit.

There's also the salary cap ceiling to consider. It may be true that you can get better value by picking later, but every team is going to be roughly spending the same amount, so there's only so much you can save. You have 90 million. You are going to spend 90 million (about).

 

The point system looks at every draft exactly the same. It doesn't work in the real world it's a bean counter method which ignores the depth of talent in any particular draft.

 

Very interesting analysis, from an economic and cost / benefit point of view. And it does make sense, if you ignore other realities. Unfortunately, it's practical application is completely hindered by two factors: (1) there's a roster maximum for NFL teams, so you have to maximize total team potential on a limited number of players, rather than grabbing unlimited players who might or might not turn into pro-bowlers; and (2) there is a salary cap and a salary floor in the NFL, so you can't just select 53 guys that cost $200,000 each, or you'll be well under the salary floor, and you can't select 53 guys that cost $5M each, or you'll be well over the cap.