Developing a Coherent Draft Strategy
Talking and writing about the NFL Draft is a challenging process for several reasons. The sheer number of prospects, the inexact science (or art?) of evaluating players, and the issue of attempting to have opinions about selections that could take years to pan out are among the biggest, but they’re hardly the only ones.
But you can’t really exist in the NFL content world without having some NFL Draft takes. How, then, do we sensibly talk about the NFL Draft? I think we have to come up with an NFL Draft strategy of our own.
There are some obvious disclaimers here. I’m not an NFL personnel executive and I don’t claim to be, and my job doesn’t depend on getting my picks right. I have the benefit of getting to talk about this process more or less in a vacuum. But with respect to the people who do this for a living, I think there are three common-sense strategies available for both fans and NFL types that will help clarify the process of talking about the NFL Draft.
What kind of picks are you making?
First, I think we need to recognize that all draft picks are going to fall into one of three categories: true needs, priority backfill, and general backfill.
True needs — the picks NFL teams won’t admit exist
True needs are, obviously, needs that your team needs to fill. A true need pick addresses an existing hole on the roster, or helps shore up a position group that would otherwise be notably talent-deficient. Wide receiver is a true need for the Packers this year. They simply cannot afford to go into the season with that position group in its current state.
True needs exist, despite the repeated insistence from NFL general managers and the like that they don’t draft for need. Teams absolutely make picks for need! Rarely, if ever, do teams have the luxury of just picking the very best player available. Every team has needs to fill, and they need to fill them.
Priority backfill — address your needs before they’re needs
Priority backfill selections are similar to true needs but don’t fill an immediate need. These are anticipatory selections, ones where it’s clear a position is about to go through some change in the near to medium term but is likely mostly set for the upcoming season.
The Packers’ 2020 selection of AJ Dillon is the perfect example of a priority backfill. Matt LaFleur’s run-oriented offense wants (or believes it wants, I suppose) premium players at the running back position. Heading into 2020, the Packers arguably had two such talents in Aaron Jones and Jamaal Williams. At the very least, they didn’t have an immediate pressing need. But they still added AJ Dillon. Why? Well, in addition to the fact that he’s an athletic marvel, both Jones and Williams were heading into the season on expiring contracts. One, perhaps both, of them wouldn’t be back for 2021. The Packers needed to add talent for the future, and chose to do so with Dillon.
General backfill — because playing football is hard on football players
Finally, we can’t ignore the rest of the roster. Many selections will be concerned with generally adding talent to the roster. Here’s an obvious fact that’s easily forgotten: your roster is going to change over the course of an NFL season. Guys will get hurt. Your ideal roster configuration will likely not be available to you for every regular-season game, if it ever is. You will be shorthanded, especially at positions that demand a lot of bodies, like the offensive and defensive lines and the defensive backfield.
That’s why you’ve got to constantly inject talent into those groups. The Packers did this with their offensive line to great effect in 2020 and 2021, spending five draft picks on interior linemen despite not having a glaring need there. Of their five selections, four (Jon Runyan Jr., Jake Hanson, Royce Newman, and Cole VanLanen) have spent time on the active roster and two (Runyan and Newman) have been regulars on the line. Imagine how the offensive line could have looked if either Runyan or Newman wasn’t on the roster in 2021. That’s the value of backfilling positions even if they don’t look like short-term needs.
How do you prioritize your picks?
The second big principle by which teams and fans should abide is to generate a guiding framework for selections, then stick with it. I have a preferred framework by which I evaluate picks (which I’ll talk about in a second) and it may or may not be a good one. But that’s beside the point. The point is to have a framework by which you make decisions, and stick with it. Don’t make exceptions to your process, lest you embody the Bill Parcells quote about suddenly having an entire team made up of exceptions.
Here’s how I prioritize the players I evaluate. Generally, I try to separate them into three tiers, outlined like so:
Players with desirable athletic traits and high-end production
Players with desirable athletic traits
Players with high-end production.
I don’t very much care what kind of measurables you target for athletic testing; I use the great Kent Lee Platte’s Relative Athletic Score, but there are other systems out there for measuring athleticism. But I think the greatest differentiator between one player and another is athletic ability, and marrying that athletic ability with great statistical production (which varies from position to position, so pick your thresholds and, once again, stick with them) will produce a good prospect more often than not.
But production isn’t everything, and if you’re going to have just one of the two, I’d rather have the athletic traits. My thinking is that it’s much more likely that an above-average athlete can much more easily become productive in the NFL than that a guy with below-average athletic gifts can continue his noteworthy college production.
You’ll notice that things like character, football intelligence, and other soft skills are absent from my list. That’s intentional, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think those things are worth considering. I just think that off-field or soft-skill stuff should be more of a guide in your evaluation of a player than a defining factor. I want to write about this more in the future, but for now, just know that it’s part of the picture.
How many picks do you have?
The final piece of the draft strategy puzzle is this: accumulate as many draft picks as possible (to a point), and don’t trade up.
The idea that the draft is an inexact science at best is among the most widely accepted truths in football. Most general managers and other football personnel people will freely admit they have a hard time forecasting exactly which players will work out and which ones won’t. Former Packers general manager Ron Wolf said if he hit on about a third of his draft picks in a given class, he’d consider that a great success.
With such a self-admitted low hit rate, it seems like common sense to want to accumulate as many draft picks as possible. Correspondingly, trading up in the draft seems like almost a uniformly bad idea. Consider this: if NFL teams are quick to admit that they generally don’t know who’s going to be good, what makes them confident they know when a specific player is going to be good?
That’s the bet you’re making when you trade up, is it not? You’re weighing your certainty about one player against the track record of players in general. I think a better rule would be to simply never trade up, even if you occasionally miss out on someone you think could be a premium addition to your team.
There are, however, exceptions, and lest we build an entire draft strategy out of exceptions, I think we should address them.
For instance, I think there’s a point at which you can have too many draft picks. I don’t know exactly where that point is, but I think it exists. To wit: the Minnesota Vikings have drafted 26 players over the past two years. Six have yet to play in an NFL game. Three others have, for various reasons, been limited to six or fewer games over the past two seasons. And more broadly, 17 of the 26 picks came in the fourth round or later. Much is said about Day 3 picks being “lottery picks,” and certainly some of those picks do hit (we’ve mentioned a few in this very piece!), but surely at least a few of those players were picked knowing they had very little chance of ever being real NFL players.
Would trading up for a more “sure thing” have been a better use of those 17 Day 3 picks? I can’t say for sure, but it’s an idea worth exploring.
Or what about a situation like the Packers find themselves in this year? They have two late first-round picks. The draft could shake out any number of ways, but what if most of the premium players at a position of need look to be gone by the time their first of two first-round picks comes around? Is it better to have one player at a position of need than to get two guys who may not be quite as good at other spots?
The data would suggest getting more players is almost always better, but if that means going into a season with a wide receiver depth chart featuring Amari Rodgers as your third-best player, I’m not sure that’s a good application of that data.
But these are exceptions and hypotheticals. Generally, by following the above principles, I think NFL teams — and their fans — can have a better idea of what’s going on in a given draft class, and, more importantly, who’s worth spending time and draft resources to acquire.