Totally Mind-Blowing Draft Statistic

Nine out of ten times, when you start digging through the numbers to confirm something you see on the field, the results are going to come out pretty much how you expected.  The specifics may vary a bit, but generally you have things right.

This is one of those exceptions.  And it kind of blows my mind.

Now, before we get to the punch line, I have a boatload of caveats:

• This is a tremendously flawed study.
• Using the results to argue definitively for a certain course of action would therefore not be advised.
• Pro Bowls as a proxy for top-tier performance is problematic both because of reputation effects (although there's an interesting twist there) and the increasing impact of idiotic fan voting.
• Just counting "Pro Bowl players" ignores the distinction between a guy who has one great year and a guy who books his Hawaii flights a year in advance.
• Finally, because we're just looking at Pro Bowls, we're missing a lot of distinction between different players. Neither Jerome McDougle nor Brodrick Bunkley has ever made the Pro Bowl. However, those are not equivalent value picks.

With that out of the way, let's talk about what I did find. 

Wikipedia keeps a nice write-up of previous NFL drafts.  It's a handy way to find out who was taken where, and it has the added benefit of identifying guys who made the Pro Bowl, which can save an awful lot of work.

I went back and looked at the top 64 drafts picks (which covers two rounds now, but extended into the third before expansion) over a 10 year period (1997-2006) to see if we could make a probabilistic argument for how the Eagles should "spend" their top three draft picks to maximize the chances that they end up with the elite playmakers I'm always going on about, or what Bob Ford called "officers"rather than foot soldiers in a post I completely agreed with until his pickup truck analogy.*

My argument for the draft was that the Eagles have shown themselves to be -- at best -- maybe slightly better than league average when it comes to picking top-tier guys, so the idea that they can somehow beat the system by identifying hidden gems in unlikely places probably doesn't hold much water.  Therefore, they should use their picks in such a way that the odds suggest they'll be most successful in finding the over-the-hump talent they need.

It's either Rich Hofmann or Phil Sheridan (sorry) who's constantly arguing that the only really consistent place to find Pro Bowlers in the draft is the top half of the first round, so when you have a chance to draft there, you need to take it.  Clearly the same logic applies to the rest of the first round vis-a-vis the second, and so on down the line.

Except, and this is the cool part, it actually doesn't.  At least the way we're measuring it here (but remember the caveats). 

Here are three charts showing the percentage or Pro Bowlers in different "slices" of the draft.  I used five, ten and 15 pick buckets, but they all really show the same thing:

You have to admit, even granting (one more time) the limitations of this analysis, that's pretty striking.  For two years we've been killing the Eagles for not spending their low first-round picks on some playmakers -- and it turns out your chances of finding a Pro Bowler are almost entirely equal everywhere from the 16th to the 45th pick. 

I'm pretty shocked by this.  I'm assuming Gabe is, too, since I sent him these charts last night and he still hasn't responded to me.  He must be speechless.

Also, remember the reputation effect with Pro Bowlers mentioned above?  I mean two things by that:  1)  Once a guy gets selected, particularly at a position like offensive line, he's likely to keep going back.  But point #2 is that better teams usually get more Pro Bowlers, just because the guys who aren't on national television every week have a hard time getting noticed.  Which is why it's double surprising that low first-round picks -- generally made by good teams -- aren't producing more Pro Bowlers than high second-round picks -- which are generally made by bad teams.

Here's another chart, just because I have it.  Ten years of drafts, the green blocks are Pro Bowlers.  Heavy lines delineate rounds one and two (with current 32 picks), narrow lines are five pick brackets:

 

Last interesting note:  if you take the probabilities above and match them up to where the Eagles drafted during that period, you find that they "should" have ended up with about 5.2 Pro Bowlers from picks in the top 64.  They actually have seven.  (Sadly, Brian Dawkins was the 65th pick his year.)

- - - - - -

*My divergence: I don't think the Eagles have specifically chosen the pickup trucks, it's just worked out that way.