Every year we see "grades" of drafts that are completely untethered from reality. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the grades awarded for a draft have almost no relationship to the actual quality of the draft class. Why is this?

I think there are two primary reasons.

1) The future success or failure of a given prospect is inherently unknowable, volatile, and difficult to predict. A draft class full of these prospects is likewise going to be extremely hard to predict. This is the most obvious reason. However, I don’t think it is the only reason.

2) People awarding grades have no idea what they’re actually evaluating. Are they judging who came away with the most valuable prospects? Who used their picks most efficiently? Which team addressed perceived needs most closely?

I think most people assigning grades have no idea what they’re trying to grade other than the vague impression of how they feel about the draft class. So a team that walks away from the draft with five top-100 prospects but did not address needs, or did not maximize their pick value may get a C, where a team that did not pick in the first two rounds but used their picks effectively may receive an A. Yet the actual talent of the class with the C may blow the A class out of the water. Additionally, those assigning grades want to avoid looking foolish and riling up fans so they tend to avoid assigning negative grades (in case the draft class turns out well) so most grades are assigned on an A to C basis.

But what are they grading? I don’t think anyone really knows.

Well, I’m going to try and fix this. Let’s start by trying to figure out which teams came out of the draft with the most talent—not filling needs, or optimizing picks, or making good trades. Just talent. Who cleaned up in terms of 2022 prospects.

The methodology of this analysis will be as follows: combine Profootballfocus’ big board and the Fitzgerald-Spielberger NFL draft value chart. So PFF’s #1 player (Aidan Hutchinson) is worth 3,000 points and the #2 player (Derek Stingley Jr) is worth 2,649, and so on and so forth. Then, add up the points value each team left the draft with (including undrafted free agents who were ranked in PFF’s top 262). I used these two sources because I think they’re the most accurate of the options out there. PFF’s big board tends to have better predictive value than most other boards I see. However, if you prefer another source, this method can be replicated with their prospect rankings instead. The Fitzgerald-Spielberger NFL draft value chart was constructed out of data from second contracts received by draft picks. So, unlike the Jimmy Johnson chart which is based on nothing, it actually has a way of measuring what a specific pick is worth to a team, on average. As such, it is the most objective method of assessing "draft pick value" that we currently have. Though, if you prefer a different value chart, it would not be hard to swap out the draft pick values for those of another.

So, looking solely at how much value each team acquired yields these results:

According to this method of evaluating the draft the Chiefs, Lions, Ravens, Giants, and Jets dominated the draft. This should not be surprising as every one of these teams had multiple first round picks. Ten years from now when we are looking back at the 2022 draft, these are the drafts most likely to be remembered as franchise-changers; the ones where a huge influx of talent hit the roster.

On the other end of the spectrum the Rams, Dolphins, Raiders, Bengals, and Browns walked away with the least amount of talent from the draft. This is also not surprising as most of these teams traded away their draft picks for players and were left picking through other teams’ scraps when the draft time came.

When it comes to assigning draft grades, this should be a major component of the grade. The primary reason we are interested in the draft is because it can give us insight into how much a given roster has improved from the previous iteration. Well, I think it is clear that the Chiefs have done more, significantly more, in this specific arena of team building, than the Rams, for example.

Of course, this is only one piece of the off-season puzzle. Free agency, and trades—such as trading away Tyreke Hill—would also need to be taken into account if we were to evaluate the offseason as a whole. But that is expanding the scope of this analysis beyond its objectives. Showing the absolute draft value haul of each team, and noticing that the Chiefs came away with 4.4 times as much prospect value as the Rams, seems far more useful to me than someone giving the Chiefs an A and the Rams a B-.

There is another important aspect to drafting that should also be considered. Perhaps you would like to know, not just who walked away with the biggest haul, but also you are interested in which teams maximized the picks they did have? Who really gets the most out of their picks? Well, this is also quite easy to figure out. Just subtract the value of the draft slot from the value of the player, add it all up again and we have the Excess Value each team gained (or lost) from their picks. Here’s how each team did at maximizing the value of their picks:

This is a way to measure draft acumen. Not just the raw total amount of talent each team got, but how good each front office is at maximizing the value of the picks they had. Given what each team had to work with, the Eagles, Colts, 49ers, Lions, and Dolphins each did the best job at taking the picks they had and getting more valuable players with those picks. They were getting good values and grabbing falling players. Conversely, the Patriots, Giants, Jaguars, Buccaneers, and Saints did the worst job at making their picks count. These teams were drafting the biggest reaches and letting value slip past them.

In part 2 I’ll go into some more discussion about the drafts of specific teams, reaches, value picks and how we can go about combining "total value" and "Excess Value gained" to come up with overall draft grades that are at least tied to some objective measures.