How Draft Round Affects a Wide Receiver's Career Performance

In the first three parts of this series, we've seen how the round in which a quarterback, lineman, or running back is drafted severely affects his career production.

Today, I'll be looking at the careers of wide receivers. With Jerry Rice, Tim Brown, Marvin Harrison, and Randy Moss all drafted high, will it be a runaway victory for the first round?

For players that had no receptions in their career, I changed their stats to those of Troy Walters, a fifth-rounder drafted in 2000 who had 102 receptions and 1,135 yards in his 98 career games. He had the third-lowest yards-per-reception average of all players with over 100 receptions in the sample.

Pro Bowls

The graph below shows the probability of a player selected in each round making one or more, two or more, or three or more Pro Bowls in his career.

There's a steep drop after the first round, and after that the data is wildly inconsistent, especially the blue line, which shows one or more Pro Bowls.

But I prefer to look at the other two lines in this case. Because wide receivers are less consistent than other positions on a year-to-year basis, a player whose true talent level is 800 yards in a season can earn a Pro Bowl slot with one 1,200-yard season. Two or more Pro Bowls shows consistency and true success.

Tracking the number of career Pro Bowls by draft round, as shown below, results in a cleaner version of the graph above.

On average, first-round wide receivers are selected to just under one more Pro Bowl than second rounders in their career.

The difference between second rounders and sixth or seventh rounders is about three-tenths of a Pro Bowl, which means that out of 10 wide-outs drafted in both the second and seventh rounds, the higher drafted players will earn a combined three more Pro Bowl bids in their careers.

That isn't supported, however, by any of the other graphs below.

Receiving Stats

Receptions, yards, and touchdowns are all highly correlated with one another. I looked at the average number of each in a wide receiver's career, and I found that the resulting graphs all look suspiciously alike.

Below, I have shown just that, with yards and touchdowns adjusted to a receptions scale (yards are divided by 12 and touchdowns are multiplied by 14).

We see that the performance of a second rounder is about 35 to 40 percent less than a first rounder and a third's is 30 percent of a second rounder's. The difference between a fifth and seventh rounder is next to nothing.

There is more than a 99 percent correlation between draft round and every one of the stats above.

In other words, we are about 98 or 99 percent confident that we can predict the future career stats of the average of all first rounders in a certain draft, all the second rounders in that draft, etc.

Because of the differences in each player's career, we cannot predict their stats, but rather the player's baseline stats based on his draft round.

The table below shows the above stats, prorated to a 16-game season. Fantasy points are equal to yards divided by 10 plus touchdowns multiplied by six plus receptions.

If we graph these stats, the result is essentially the same trend as the above graph showing career stats.

Years Starting

The below graph shows the average number of years as a starter for each draft round.

As with the receiving stats, the number of years started by draft round shows a gradual decrease from the first to the second round, but the declines from each of the remaining rounds to the next is larger than the drops of the receiving stats.

What Does All of This Mean?

1. First rounders are elected to one more Pro Bowl in their careers than second rounders. Based on Pro Bowls alone, there's a steep slope after the first round and a gradual decrease in the remaining rounds.

2. By looking at receiving stats, we can show that the difference between the first two rounds isn't as big as previously thought. The graph of the average career numbers of each draft round shows an almost perfect function, which can be expressed in the following formulas:

3. In a season's worth of play, second rounders perform about 25 percent worse than first rounders. In their careers, they are about 35 to 40 percent worse, which suggests that second rounders play less games than first rounders but are better on a per-game basis than on an aggregate.

4. Essentially, we have backed up our prior hypothesis of the decrease from each round to the next, save for maybe the finding that the difference isn't as steep as thought.