One of the things we can do with the consensus board is use the values there to “grade” draft picks. Though we do not have the information that teams do (and therefore, the board will too heavily reward whomever picks Myles Jack and Jaylon Smith), it gives us some idea of how teams did against the evaluation of third-party scouts.
Let’s look into the draft capital teams spent and look at first-round “winners.” Assuming that the evaluator board is better at pure talent evaluation, a hypothesis weakly confirmed by previous work, we can grade the picks against where they were ranked in the evaluator board.
Because having a higher pick means having more capital, it’s easier to represent the gains and losses by value returned as a percentage of the total capital available. The results shouldn’t be too surprising.
| Team | Value |
| Miami Dolphins | 179% |
| Minnesota Vikings | 128% |
| Buffalo Bills | 126% |
| Jacksonville Jaguars | 122% |
| Washington Redskins | 114% |
| New York Jets | 113% |
| Tampa Bay Buccaneers | 103% |
| Carolina Panthers | 101% |
| San Diego Chargers | 100% |
| New Orleans Saints | 100% |
| Cincinnati Bengals | 100% |
| Denver Broncos | 99% |
| Arizona Cardinals | 97% |
| Dallas Cowboys | 95% |
| San Francisco 49ers | 95% |
| Detroit Lions | 94% |
| Baltimore Ravens | 93% |
| Cleveland Browns | 89% |
| Green Bay Packers | 89% |
| Seattle Seahawks | 83% |
| Houston Texans | 74% |
| Indianapolis Colts | 72% |
| Tennessee Titans | 72% |
| Chicago Bears | 69% |
| New York Giants | 67% |
| Los Angeles Rams | 67% |
| Oakland Raiders | 64% |
| Philadelphia Eagles | 63% |
| Pittsburgh Steelers | 63% |
| Atlanta Falcons | 59% |
I don’t think anyone’s surprised that the Rams and Eagles are ranked so lowly. The Raiders’ low ranking is one I disagree with, as I think the evaluator boards were not properly assessing how good Karl Joseph is.
The Falcons take the cake with Keanu Neal at 17th overall and though a strong safety is important to their scheme in a way many safeties are not (and more important than their free safety), it still feels like an incredible reach—and the board doesn’t even take into account the existence of the other box safeties in the draft.
The Dolphins, of course, “won” with Laremy Tunsil and the Vikings have matched their previous return-on-board value records as a team that traditionally takes the most value on the board with their selection of the board’s top receiver.
This analysis will be more interesting at the conclusion of the seventh round, but this gives us a sneak preview as this constitutes most of the grade for most of the teams.
