NFL Draft: Positional Breakdown of What to Expect in the 1st Round

This week in the NFL, all eyes are on the upcoming 2012 draft. The media and fans have been waiting for this moment practically since the conclusion of the 2011 draft. Front offices around the league have spent months preparing and scheming for the upcoming influx of talent.

Although projected top picks Andrew Luck and, more recently, Robert Griffin III have largely dominated the conversation for the 2012 draft, they are just two players in a field of hundreds of hopeful players who will be awaiting the call of a lifetime.

There are other big names like wide receiver Justin Blackmon and offensive tackle Matt Kalil who have generated their share of buzz, as they have proved themselves worthy of first-round selection by a team with need at their position.

That being said, the excitement and the mystery of the NFL draft remains strong.

Key players aside, there are not 32 prospects who have distinguished themselves so thoroughly from the rest that they are locks to be picked up in the first round. Besides, no amount of speculation can accurately predict the direction that each of the teams will chose to go.

If we can’t reliably match specific names to specific teams through mock drafts, is it at least possible to predict which positions are likely to be more popular picks in the first round? If history is a reliable indicator, then the answer is actually yes.

Since 1990, the NFL draft has followed a fairly predictable format. Positions that are popular first-round picks in one draft tend to be more or less equally popular in other drafts. Other positions are almost never selected in the first round.

Based on that information, here are the approximate positional breakdowns that we can anticipate being selected in the first round:

Position	Selections
C	>1
CB	2
DB	2
DE	4
DE/LB	>1
DL	>1
DT	3
FS	>1
G	>1
K	>1
LB	3
OG	>1
OT	4
QB	2
RB	3
S	1
SS	>1
TE	1
WR	4

Of course, as with any statistical breakdown, there is always the potential for anomalies. For example, despite wide receiver being the second-most popular draft position over the past 21 years (comprising approximately 11.8 percent of all picks), there were notably zero wide receivers selected in the first round of the 2008 draft. Meanwhile, in 2009, there were two centers—a position that is almost never picked up in the first round of the draft—selected.

Instead, this is merely a general guideline that can be used in conjunction with the plethora of mock drafts floating around to help paint a more complete picture of what we can expect to see on the first day of the draft.