Some Rookie Draft Data For You.

[Kevin]

While we're waiting to get the data processed for the upcoming season, I thought I'd share some draft information. I've been wanting to do this for a while.

This is for the leagues that participated in the rookie draft of 2022. I've sorted the lists from highest average pick to lowest across all leagues, and will present it in batches as time allows.

I calculated these using a score for each pick from 1 to 168. If a player was drafted 1st in a league he gets 168 points, the second guy drafted gets 167 points, and so on down to 1 point for Mr. Irrelevant (a nickname I despise, by the way). If a guy is not drafted he gets zero points. I calculated these scores across all leagues and then averaged them. Therefore, a perfect score would be 168 points if a guy is drafted 1st in every single league.

Here are the top five guys. I'll post more as we go.

Score Player Highest Draft Pick Lowest Draft Pick
167.8 Travon Walker 1 2
166.8 Aidan Hutchinson 2 4
165.8 Derek Stingley Jr. 1 5
164.5 Sauce Gardner 4 6
164.3 Kayvon Thibodeaux 1 6

These guys are no surprise. They were also typically drafted 1 through 5 in that order. Walker was drafted 1st in 85 percent of leagues and Hutchinson was drafted 2nd in 85 percent of leagues. Stingley was drafted 3rd in 62 percent of leagues and Gardner was drafted 4th in 62 percent of leagues. Finally, Thibodeaux was drafted 5th in 55 percent of leagues.

[Kevin]

#6 through 10 spots. We start to see some spread here. Almost all of these guys had at least one league where they slipped out of the top ten.

Score Player Highest Draft Pick Lowest Draft Pick
162.5 Ikem Ekwonu 5 8
160.9 Evan Neal 7 14
160.2 Drake London 6 15
159.8 Charles Cross 3 13
157.9 Jordan Davis 3 17

[Kingswood]

I imagine the drafts follow so closely to the NFL draft because the worst teams, for the most part, are bots.

[Kevin]

I imagine the drafts follow so closely to the NFL draft because the worst teams, for the most part, are bots.

There's probably some of that. I also figure a lot of people are going to weigh the NFL teams' decisions highly at the top of the list.

[Kevin]

#11 through #15. Williams and Green both had one big outlier on the low end, and Hamilton had one big outlier on the high side.

Score Player Highest Draft Pick Lowest Draft Pick
157.1 Chris Olave 10 16
155.4 Kyle Hamilton 3 19
154.8 Jameson Williams 11 25
153.9 Kenyon Green 8 27
151.5 Zion Johnson 14 23

[UmmBerrto]

Pretty cool 😎😎😎😎

[Kevin]

16 to 20

Score Player Highest Draft Pick Lowest Draft Pick
151.5 Zion Johnson 8 27
149.8 Jahan Dotson 16 28
148.7 Kenny Pickett 7 26
148.0 Treylon Burks 18 29
148.0 Trent McDuffie 8 27

In three cases, one team really wanted Johnson, Pickett, and McDuffie and drafted them very high compared to all other leagues.

[Kevin]

21 to 25

146.3 Quay Walker 15 28
145.8 Trevor Penning 19 30
144.1 Kaiir Elam 17 29
143.5 Breece Hall 11 40
142.8 Tyler Linderbaum 19 33

So check out Breece Hall. It'll illustrate the challenges with valuing running backs in the modern era. In 15 percent of leagues he went before the 16th pick. In 46 percent of leagues, he went in the back half of the first round. And in 38 percent of leagues he went in the top half of the 2nd round. That's a big variation.

[Kevin]

26 through 32, to finish out the first round.

Score Player Highest Draft Pick Lowest Draft Pick
26 142.5 Devin Lloyd 14 32
27 141.8 Tyler Smith 18 31
28 141.2 Jermaine Johnson II 20 34
29 141.1 George Karlaftis 11 36
30 139.0 Devin Harper 30 30
31 138.9 Devonte Wyatt 21 36
32 136.5 Cole Strange 29 37

Lloyd and Karlaftis both had an outlier with a particularly high pick. And here's an oddity - every single league drafted Devin Harper at #30. The odds of that have to be really low.

[Reggy]

Devin Harper was a 6th round pick in life, so that certainly isn’t true.