The chance of a bust in the NFL draft
May 1, 2012
With the 2012 NFL draft officially complete, the fans of every NFL franchise are dissecting their teams draft picks looking for hidden gems and potential busts. Intuitively, early picks in the draft have a much higher propensity to succeed in the NFL as we showed last week. What about the chance that a pick will be a bust? It’s been well covered that, out of the four times in NFL draft history a QB has been chosen 1 and 2, only once have both QBs been successful (1971: Jim Plunkett and Archie Manning). We decided to expand the search and look at all picks over the last 50 years and determine the average chance an NFL draft pick will be a bust.
What is a “bust?” We'll look at it two different ways. First, a bust is a player that ends up with a value score of less than 5 according to pro-football-reference.com. A value of less than 5 is equivalent to a marginal role player that has limited game experience and contributes little to no value to an NFL franchise. Here it is in a visual:You can see from about round 6 (pick 160) and later, the percent chance of failing on a draft pick is over 70%. With such a low hit rate, NFL teams should focus their decision making on players that fit their current schema and can be a strong contributor on special teams.
Now, with early round picks, the expectation is a lot higher than just contributing on the field. With a first or second round pick, an NFL team is expecting a player that can come in, start, and contribute for years to come. With that in mind, our second method for setting the bar for a “bust” is that the player starts for less than one year or plays less than 40 games in their career. Here's the same visual with the different way of measuring busts:
A couple of interesting notes
from the graph. First, picking at the end of the second round only
gives your team a 50% chance of finding a starter. Going towards the
end of the round 3, your chance of finding a starter falls to
~30%. Using this criteria and our draft value chart from last week, let’s
evaluate a couple of the trades from Friday.
Another interesting note, in the later rounds, an NFL team has a
really slim chance of finding the next Tom Brady in round 6 or Donald
Driver in round 7. The data shows that finding a starter in round 6 or
7 is only 10 - 20%. Further strengthening the argument to search for
players that are effective on special teams in later rounds. Finally,
see pick 148 on the graph (highlighted in blue). In the past 50 years,
only two players picked 148 have started more than one year and played
in at least 40 games. Best of luck
to