I wanted to make a few comments and observations on the most recent NFL Draft, which took place in Detroit last week. I've always found the process of how NFL teams evaluate players quite interesting, particularly since the result rarely goes exactly according to plan. A few years ago, Tom Servo looked at several years of the NFL Draft and found that 50% of players drafted in the first round develop into solid NFL starters for their teams, which decreased to 33% for players drafted in the second round. After that, the percentages dropped by half over each subsequent round (third round -16%, fourth round - 8%, etc). Servo said, "Odds are not high you will become a difference maker in the NFL... no matter where you're taken." Moreover, only 30% of drafted players actually end up on a NFL roster! Add to those less than impressive statistics the fact that arguably one of the greatest players in the history of the NFL - Tom Brady - was drafted in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL Draft at pick #199!
Michael Roberto, a Bryant University business school professor, blogger (see "Professor Michael Roberto's Blog"), and author, posted last week (before the 2024 NFL Draft) his own analysis of how well the NFL does at picking talented players (see "The NFL Draft: Are Teams Getting Better at Selecting Talent?"). He compared drafts in the 1970's and 1980's to drafts in the two most recent decades and found:
1. Teams are selecting more quarterbacks in the first round compared to past drafts. Notably, a record-high six quarterbacks were selected in the opening round of the 2024 NFL Draft! The quarterback has become in the last decade or so the most important position in football, so the fact that teams are drafting more quarterbacks in the first round is not a surprise.
2. Consistent with the statistics above, despite the ubiquitous use of sophisticated data analytics and psychological testing, teams are not any better at picking stars today than they were in the 1970's and 1980's. From 1970-1989, 50% of the quarterbacks selected in the first round from 1970-1989 made at least one Pro Bowl (the NFL's version of the All-Star Game). From 2000-2019? You guessed it - 50% of quarterbacks selected in the first round made the Pro Bowl at least once.
3. The chance of selecting a Super Bowl winning quarterback is very low. Again, from 1970-1989, 8 of the 38 (21%) quarterbacks selected in the first round were the starting quarterbacks on Super Bowl championship teams compared to only 5 of 56 (9%) quarterbacks selected in the first round from 2000-2019. The fact remains that the most elite quarterbacks (which are very hard to predict) generally win multiple Super Bowls. For example, five quarterbacks have won 36% of the Super Bowls ever played (Brady, Bradshaw, Montana, Aikman, and Mahomes), and twelve quarterbacks have won 60% of the Super Bowls ever played!
Unfortunately, things don't quite work out as well as they did in the 2014 film "Draft Day" starring Kevin Costner, the late Chadwick Boseman, and Jennifer Garner. I've posted about the movie a couple of times in the past (see "Vontae Mack No Matter What", "Attitude > Talent", and "All you need is faith, trust, and a little pixie dust..."), and it's a really good movie in my opinion. But it's fiction.
So, what is there to learn from the NFL Draft? Despite the amount of time and money spent on evaluating players, it's still a bit of a roll of the dice whether a player will turn out to take a team to proverbial promised land of a Super Bowl Championship. I suspect that the same is true about picking leaders in organizations. As Michael Roberto writes, "Beware of the hype around various talent evaluation tools. Yes, analytics can be helpful, as can other new tools for evaluating talent. However, we should be skeptical of those who claim that these new tools and methods can dramatically improve our ability to identify top talent."
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