NFL draft – The best time of the year…. You bet…

NFL, NCAA Football American football, in America just football... call it what you will, but everything connected to this wonderful sport fascinates me greatly. The football season only lasts from early September to the Super Bowl in early February, but I follow the sports very closely 365 days a year and there is no way that I consider this period around April as a quiet time in the NFL. In fact the only time of the year, where I find it hard to find any interesting news associated with the sport is in the last few weeks before training camp starts.

In this coming weekend, the premier off season NFL event takes place in New York City, the annual NFL draft. As a football nerd combined with the fact that I am extremely interested in the strategic running of sports franchises, I will not miss this event for the world. So here Saturday and Sunday, I will be as antisocial as humanly possible and spend the majority of the weekend either listening to internet radio, watching the streaming of the event from Radio City Music Hall on my computer or read some of my 300+ pages of draft prospects, position rankings, value charts etc. To mark this happy event, I will here just like I do with the Super Bowl eat some solid homemade American food and drink a few high quality American beers from the several superb American micro breweries.

Earlier in my life, or to be precise from the time I was 12-13 years old until a couple of years ago, I spent countless hours playing computer games, especially games within the sports management genre, such as Champions Ship Manger (later Football manager). I stopped playing these computer games, because I find it much more interesting to spend time analysing the strategic planning that is connected with running an NFL franchise, mainly because this is connected with real life and not just a computer game. In my opinion the long term strategic planning and the long term consequences of bad or good decisions made at the front office level have a much bigger impact in the NFL than for example the English football Premier League. This shows in both leagues, when you look at teams who are successful in the two different leagues. In the Premier League money rules and the winner of the league will always be found among the four richest clubs Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea or Liverpool.

In contrast to the Premier League, the NFL is a closed, private league with a set of common rules that apply for all 32 teams. I am a very big fan of the organization of the league, for example the system where players are drafted by the different teams, and players are traded for draft picks or other players instead of these gigantic transfer sums paid in European football today. Another, in my opinion very successful step, to make the NFL even more competitive, was the introduction of the salary cap several years ago. The short and very basic explanation of the salary cap is that all 32 teams are not allowed to spend more money on player salaries than a fixed amount, these days app. 127 million annually, on the final 53 man roster, though the complexity of the player contracts combined with how a contract counts against the salary cap as well as the different rules applying for the creation of the player roster make this much more complicated than it sounds. As a consequence of this, you have spend the money on player salaries wisely, so the players with the big, fat contracts should be the ones, who make a major, positive difference on the field. As an example of this, the Washington Redskins better get good production from their big off season acquisition, Defensive tackle Albert Haynesworth, who signed a 7 year, 100 million dollar deal, 41 million dollars guaranteed. This contract obviously eats loads of salary cap space the coming seasons, so if he performs poorly and the Redskins will have to cut him in the not too distant future, they will take a gigantic salary cap hit that will set the franchise back several years.

The NFL draft system works the way that the team, which finished the last season with the worst winning record will have the first pick in each of the 7 rounds. In the long run, this should and has also meant that more teams can be become successful, unlike the Premier League where money, to a long extend, can buy you a championship, and it is the same 3 or 4 teams, who fight for the league title every season This is not possible in the NFL, where you have to be under the salary cap.

The contracts given to players drafted by the NFL teams decrease gradually more or less with the pick they are selected by in the draft. For example the first over all draft pick get the biggest contract, the 2nd overall pick get the 2nd biggest contract etc, all the way down to the last pick of the 7TH round, also called Mr. Irrelevant. Since each contract is negotiated individually between the team, the player and the agent representing the player, it can be that the contract given to the player selected 11th overall is bigger than the contract given to the player selected 10th overall, but in most cases it is so that, the higher the player is drafted, the bigger contract he gets.

In my opinion the contracts given to the players, who get drafted, have reached a ridiculously high level, which should not be given to a player who has not proven him self in the league yet. Last year, Jake Long, the offensive tackle from the University of Michigan was selected by the Miami Dolphins as the first player in the draft. He received a 5 year, 57.75 million dollar contract from The Miami Dolphins and was thereby the highest paid offensive tackle in the league, even though he had not played one single game as a professional. Obviously, Jake Long with his monster contract will occupy much of the salary cap space the Dolphins can allocate, so he has to be good player in the professional league, which he luckily for Miami also seems to be. However, Not all teams are so clever - or lucky as the Dolphins, and often a player is drafted very high in the first round but he turns out to be a complete bust in professional league. If a player selected in the Top 3 turns out to be a bust, it will set the franchise back several years, not just because of salary cap implications, but also because the public humiliation of the franchise can lead to a long term losing streak, like the Lions and Cardinals have battled against for several years.

MY NFL draft study

I have said for several years that the teams, which manage to be successful in the NFL over a long time span, like the Steelers, Patriots and Colts are the ones, who make the best decisions on the front office level. Perhaps the biggest decisions made at this strategic level are the ones concerning both coaching and player personnel. Without having made a serious study of the different NFL teams, my initial impression is that the most successful teams in the salary cap era are the ones, who built the team via the draft and not the teams such as the Washington Redskins and the Dallas Cowboys that spend so much money on high paid free agents. In other words, the successful teams in the league are the ones, who manage to find good, quality players in the draft and focus on keeping these players for several years, so they will not test free agency. In order to have a more clear view of how the teams have drafted, I have decided to make a study of the first round of the NFL drafts from 1997 to 2006. Since it takes at least three years for a player to develop, it would be premature to include players drafted after 2006.

Furthermore, my study should also give a better impression of which player positions in the draft, which eventually becomes successful in the league. Is it for example so that corner backs picked in the first round turn out to be more successful than for example outside line backers?? In this connection, it is also interesting to focus on the positions each team has a tendency to spend a first round draft pick on and of course how successful this team has been in the last 10-11 years.

In my study I will also try to put focus on the different colleges, where the different players are picked from. I have a feeling that generally corner backs from Ohio State picked in the first round of the draft become very good pro players and defensive line men from Florida state the exact opposite. And is there a tendency that certain NFL teams generally pick players from specific colleges and do these players turn out to be successful in the NFL. I hope my study can give some kind of answer to this.

In order to get a better answer to such extremely important questions in life, I have until further decided that I will use the following criteria for the players in my study of the 1 round of the NFL draft since 1997: The year the player was drafted, with which pick in the first round the player was taken, Team that drafted the player, The players name, the players college, the players position, years with the team that drafted the player, total years in the NFL and finally the most difficult one, was the pick successful or not.

Obviously, my judgement of each pick is the big one here and the one that is by far the most time consuming. I do realize that there are so many factors that influence whether a pick is successful or not and my study cannot take all these factors into consideration. For example, it is very common that a players’ career is cut short by injuries, which may mean that I will label the player a bust and thereby also criticize the team, who drafted the player, though in most cases no one can predict that injuries will ruin a players’ tenure in the NFL.

Another example of how my study and the data from the study can be misleading will be the evaluation of the late Sean Taylor, picked by the Washington Redskins in 2004. In my study, it will show that he only had a short NFL career, but obviously he is far from being a bust, in fact he was a phenomenal player, who only had a short carrier in the NFL, because he was so tragically murdered a few years ago. R.I.P. Sean Taylor.

In my study, I rate certain positions to be of more importance than others, just like the NFL team does. There is a reason why you rarely see kickers or punters picked in the first round. A good example of how the playing position can influence my valuation of the pick is Donte Whither, the safety who was picked by the Buffalo Bills with the 8th pick of the draft in 2006. Though, he is not a bad player, he is no where near being as good as the best safeties such Ed Reed, Troy Polamalu and Bob Sanders. When you spend such a high draft pick on a safety like the Bills did with Donte Whitner, I expect him to become a major difference maker and since Donte Whitner has not turned to be this kind of player, I label him a draft bust.

Of course, it may be that I find something more interesting to write about and I will skip this draft study…. Yeah right…It is more realistic that the next Slayer release will be a UB40 influenced reggae album than something can be more interesting than a study of the importance of the NFL draft.

I wish you all a great NFL draft weekend.