What Are the Safest Positions To Draft in the First Round?

Introduction   

Shortly before the 2008 NFL Draft, an article appeared on ESPN.com reviewing the relative success and failure of first round draft picks by position. 

The article pigeon-holed each first round pick into either met expectations, exceeded expectations, or did not meet expectations. 

Unfortunately, the article was vague about how the expectations were defined and I think unfairly included players who had completed as little as one year in the league. 

Many players do not reach their peak until they have been in the pros for up to five seasons.

After reading the article mentioned above I decided to do a more scientific study of what positions are safest to select in the first round and which are the most risky. The source of my data was pro-football-reference.com. 

                                                                 Methods

My study was based on the careers of all players selected in the first round from 1995 through 2004, which allows a minimum of five years in the league and enough time to make a fair evaluation. 

Each first round pick (except kicker Sebastian Janikowski) was placed in one of the following categories based on the position he played in college – QB, RB, WR, TE, OL, DT, DE, LB, and DB.

For each player I recorded his career starts, and to make things fairer to the younger players, I divided that number by the total number he could have played. 

I also recorded position-specific career stats and graded players as fairly as possible in spite of varied career lengths.

Once all the statistics had been collected, I performed some elementary analysis for each position. 

I calculated averages and standard deviations, which were then used to assign each player a grade from 1 to 5 as follows with a well-known example:

1. Bust – Ryan Leaf (need I say more?)
2. Disappointment – Ron Dayne (a guy who isn’t a total bust but is a bit below the average for a first round pick)
3. Starter – Vonnie Holliday (a player that will start a bunch of games and do a pretty good job but nothing spectacular)
4. Pro Bowler – Warrick Dunn (consistently good player with more than one Pro Bowl season or impressive stats but not quite worthy of Canton)
5. Future Hall of Famer – Tony Gonzalez (consistently great player over a long period of time)

As a rule of thumb players who were more than a standard deviation worse than the average were graded a 1. 

Players who were more than a standard deviation better than the average with multiple Pro Bowl appearances and long careers were graded a 5.  This distinction was not granted to any player drafted after 2002 due to the length of career requirement. 

Disappointments tended to be more than half the standard deviation worse than the average, and Pro Bowlers mostly were more than half a standard deviation better than average. 

All players who did not fall into any of the categories listed above were assigned a grade of 3.

                                       Grading the Positions

It is the nature of the NFL for more busts to come out of the first round of the draft than future hall of famers (15% versus 7% for all positions).

Disappointments versus Pro Bowlers is a bit more even with 21% disappointments versus 22% Pro Bowlers, but this is not quite sufficient to off-set the discrepancy between the number of grade 1 and grade 5 players.  Therefore, for most positions, the average grade is slightly less than 3.

 The average grades range from 2.61 for running backs to 3.14 for linebackers.  Other average grades included 2.70 for quarterbacks, 2.76 for wide receivers, 2.77 for defensive ends, 2.98 for offensive linemen, and 3.00 for tight ends.

The low average grade for running backs reflects the fact that there were a higher percentage of busts among running backs than any other position.  More than 19% of first round running backs were bad enough to rate a grade of 1 compared with 0 tight ends and about 10% linebackers. 

Running backs also had the highest percentage of combined busts and disappointments (48%) but the lowest percentage of hall of famers and pro bowlers was observed among tight ends (21%). 

Quarterback has nearly as high a percentage of busts and disappointments as running back, but a 30% chance of drafting a 4 or 5 in the first round, making the position the most prone to boom or bust.

Based on this analysis the safest position to draft in the first round is linebacker.  There was a smaller percentage of 1 and 2 grades combined (28%) and a higher percentage of 4 and 5 grades (41%) at that position than any other.

 Drafting a tight end, offensive lineman or wide receiver in the first round is most likely to yield an average first round player, but teams rarely win Super Bowls by drafting average players.