The NFL Draft: What High Draft Picks Turn Into Stars?

We did an article earlier this week, entitled NFL Draft: Need Line Help? Don’t Wait. In that article, we looked at players who were drafted after pick No. 200. As we were doing this research, we were struck by the lack of offensive and defensive linemen in this group—thus the title of that article.

We also read comments from two readers who noted that “undrafted” players were not included in our sample, and one specifically asked if we would do a similar article which explored the mighty undrafted.

This seemed like a grand idea, and we decided to come up with an approach that would look at both drafted and undrafted players on a position-by-position basis evenly.  What can we say?  We love analytical challenges at PossessionPoints.com.

Looking at stat leaders for quarterback, wide receiver, or running back is an easy task, but statistics for offensive linemen are not as prevalent. Just using stat leaders would not give a fair assessment to all positions, and it could skew the results.  

Since we wanted to evaluate all positions on similar criteria, we settled on the following approach. We took all the players, starters and reserves on the 2008 and 2009 Pro Bowl rosters, eliminated duplicates, and looked at them position-by-position.

We grouped some positions together such as linebackers, running backs, and safeties (we didn’t list specifically inside and outside linebacker, fullback, and running back, or free and strong safety).

We then took these categories, which typically had 15 to 20 players in them and looked at how many of these players were drafted in the top 100.

We had a total of 147 unique players for the two years, and of these 147 Pro-Bowlers, 75 percent were in the top 100 of their draft. So, which positions had the highest and lowest percentage of being drafted in the top 100?

Offensive tackle had 88 percent of their 16 total players drafted in the top 100. In fact, 14 of the 16 fell in the top 50.

There was one OT, Jake Long, who was drafted No. 1 overall, and there was also only one OT, Jason Peters, who went undrafted back in 2004. The only other OT that was outside the top 50 was Matt Birk who was pick 173 back in 1998.

At the other end of the spectrum was the quarterback position. The most highly-valued position had only 54% of their Pro-Bowlers drafted in the top 100 in their draft class.  There were 13 unique quarterbacks in the group.

While this group had the most players picked No. 1 overall (the Manning boys), it also had three who were undrafted; Kurt Warner, Tony Romo, and Jeff Garcia.

There were seven QBs who were picked with a selection between one and 32, but none were selected between 32 and 187. In addition to the three totally undrafted quarterbacks, there were three who were taken late in the draft at selections between 187 and 213.

We found it curious that just ahead of quarterbacks in percentage were guards and centers who had just 57% of their Pro-Bowlers drafted in the top 100.

The G/C category had five Pro-Bowlers (Kris Dielman, Brian Waters, Shaun O’Hara, Casey Wiegmann, and Jeff Saturday) who went totally undrafted. However, other than those five, there was only one Pro-Bowler, Dan Koppen, who was drafted after 50 at selection 164.

It is interesting to note that with the overall average of 75 percent, the positions of quarterback, guard/center, and running back fell below this mark while the wide receiver position was just at 75 percent.  

The positions that ranked above the 75 percent drafted in the top 100 were defensive end, defensive tackle, cornerback, tight end, linebacker, safety, and offensive tackle.

Why does it appear that scouts can find quality offensive tackles, but when it comes to the high-profile positions of quarterback, running back and wide receiver, they are not as successful?

Could it be that raw physical attributes, easily measured by scouts, such as height, weight, speed and strength of offensive tackles correlate more directly to success in the NFL?

On the other side of the coin, do scouts have trouble quantifying the less-tangible attributes such as desire, leadership and decision-making at the skill positions of quarterback, running back and wide receiver?

This sounds like a reasonable theory to us, but we would love to hear your feedback on it.

For your reference, below is a table of the positions we looked at, the number of Pro-Bowlers who fell into each category, the percent drafted in the top 100, and other info we’ve talked about above.

Position	Total on Rosters	Drafted   1-100	Drafted   100-200	Drafted   200+	Undrafted	Percent Drafted top 100
OT	16	14	1	0	1	88%
S	8	7	0	1	0	88%
LB	13	11	1	0	1	85%
TE	6	5	0	0	1	83%
CB	16	13	2	1	0	81%
DT	9	7	0	0	2	78%
DE	18	14	3	1	0	78%
WR	16	12	1	2	1	75%
RB	18	12	3	0	3	67%
G/C	14	8	1	0	5	57%
QB	13	7	2	1	3	54%