Snap count per round would be an interesting stat. I'm sure you get plenty of UDFA that play on special teams and just because they technically played in a game doesn't meant they played anywhere close to the 2nd round guy.
I'd also wonder if the position played varied by round.
Like kickers might be more likely to go 5th round (or whatever) and are more likely to have long careers than most other positions.
I was going to ask "what if you changed it to played in at least 2 games?" or "started in a game?"
But I think you're on to something - this would be a good metric
Not sure how big of a factor it would be, but I imagine R2 is where a lot of guys who were slated to be R1 (high talent) who slid due to injury/personal issues fall, and those issues might contribute to less game appearances.
Probably not. Sports drafts are complex mechanisms and do not necessarily reflect a simple formula where better players are picked first.
Certain positions (like QB) are more highly valued but more likely to be boom/bust, whereas RBs are valued but because they have short careers and are plentiful, they are often drafted later (e.g. 3rd rd). Teams utilize a lot of RBs because they get injured a lot. Meanwhile you have specialists like Ks/Ps who might be drafted in rd 7 but have 15-yr careers because their positions are not as punishing.
That one-game-minimum criterion will skew the data further toward the later part of he draft than would, say, a 30-game minimum (and even more so 120).
There might be a lot of players in that dataset who had their "cup of coffee" in the league due simply to an injury situation.
For anyone outside the US or not into sports, the most significant bias in the metric is that by far the largest pool of players is the "undrafted" group. Every other group is limited to roughly 30 players per year but undrafted has no cap.
A lot of those undrafted players are capable of playing in the league and there are many on practice squads partly because they are cheaper and may be as good or marginally worse than drafted players.
Sewing these players called up of a single game or two late in the season as a fill-in is not uncommon.
Roster management is, in great part, a cost-mangement exercise, not only a talent-maximizing exercise.
Also, teams out of contention for play-off spots might play more low-end players to keep their best players healthy.
TLDR: There are too many mitigating factors on the data set to draw coherent conclusions in a TLDR.
>Probably not.
Yes, the third round is larger than the second round because of comp picks. In the past three years the third round has had 28% more picks than the second round. Cc u/SabTab22
Yes, but I still say it is probably not simply due to that single effect. The entire point of my response is that it's not so straightforward.
Edit: that said, 28% is a larger than I'd thought.
They are drafting humans, so it’s not an exact science and there are tons of factors at play. There are no r-squares of 1.00 around a sole factor when dealing with people. However, nothing is more correlative of pro success than the spot in the draft in which the player was selected (in part because of the talent of higher picks, and in part because of sunk cost fallacy). The fact that round three is the only round where we see an increase in players has more to do with the fact that round three is the only round where we jump from no comp picks to comp picks, causing the pool of players to be 28% higher then round two. u/SabTab22 has the right assumption.
This title confused the hell out of me. I get it now. It’s saying “of the active NFL players who played one game, this is where they were/were not drafted”.
Thanks. I was looking through the comments for someone who could explain why anybody would have played a game in the NFL last year, then been in the draft this year.
Is it because a lot of undrafted players play a game or a few games as a trial?
Does it change if you go by count(games) rather than count(players)?
(I know nothing about NFL so that might be completely wrong)
No, it's because the number of players in each round is a finite 32. The most recent figure I found is that there's roughly 71,000 college football players in the US. 7 rounds * 32 teams = 224 players drafted each year. So roughly 0.3% of the population is represented in the visualization of rounds 1-7, while the remaining 99.7% is represented in the undrafted population.
Now, there's plenty of criticism of that breakdown. Just off the cuff, 1) most Division II, III, and even most D-I players will never sniff an NFL stadium, 2) only a small portion of players who don't get drafted declare for the draft or even attempt to play in the NFL, and 3) undrafted players frequently play college ball for more than one year so they'd be double-, triple-, or even quadruple-counted whereas drafted players would only count once.
...but any way you slice it, the reason for the seemingly high number of undrafted players is the sheer volume of undrafted players vs. a relatively very small number of drafted players. This visualization makes it look like undrafted players are more likely to play in the NFL, which couldn't be further from the truth.
Minor correction: due to comp picks, there aren’t 32 picks in each round. That’s probably why there are more 3rd round players than 2nd round players in the visualization (37 3rd round picks this year vs. 32 2nd rounders, for instance)
You…didn’t answer that guys’ question at all.
The question was whether just counting players who only played at least one game would give different results than counting the number of games that players participated in.
I suspect the number would be substantially different.
Lots of third and fourth string players, who are more likely to be the undrafted ones, only get into one or two games per season due to injuries or other reasons.
The population of NCAA players is completely irrelevant. You would want to look at the number of players that declare for the draft compared to the number picked.
If you go by games played, the undrafted % decreased to 26%, if you go by games started it decreases to 13% of total. The average undrafted player who played, played in 10.1 games out of the 17-game seasons. The average drafted player, played in 12.6.
Would be interested to see this filtered only for offense/defense snaps, rather include special teams players.
Also could be cool to understand the % by players who played the majority of snaps at their position.
So you are saying I have a chance? 37 years old, 6'1", 170 lbs, 7.47 second forty, and I can do both pushups. My only real drawback is that I have terrible hands and poor situational awareness, I would make a terrible coach on the field, and I lack that will to win.
6’1’’, 170. Absolutely. The blue print for your size is out there. 10 guys just like you have done it. Check for yourself. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/s/HPXLOqOGsm
Does this include pre-season games? I'm thinking round 5-7 guys have the best chance to get beat out by UDFAs in training camp and since a team may draft 3-6 guys in rounds 5-7, the team will sign roughly 10 UDFAs after the draft. Nice visual though, never even considered this.
So each round of the draft has picks fewer players than the previous round? Meaning some teams aren't getting 1 pick in each round? I realize that trades happen, but I just assumed every team had a pick in each round. I think the NBA does a simpler draft so maybe that's what I expected here.
No, with each round, the talent is reduced and the players chances of making the roster dwindle as well. On average, each team has one pick per round, but circumstances can also change that.
I don’t know if this is how I read it or it was intended this way but this seems slightly misleading. To me this post makes it seem like it’s preferable to go undrafted because you have a greater chance of playing in the nfl if you are undrafted. While the stat is probably true the opposite is true, the higher you are drafted the greater your chances of making and playing for an nfl team are.
Yes, but a single player can only be drafted in a single round, or go undrafted. The way this is presented it looks like as a draftee you would want to go undrafted. Undrafted has more than double the percent of any other single round, and more total players than any other round. I think a good companion stat is what percent of players from each round make/play in the nfl. First round players are probably around 95% going down from there with 6th and 7th round players making the team 30% of the time.
Right, I’m just telling you the simple math. If 30% go undrafted, the flip side is that 70% get drafted. I’ve done what you’re suggesting, it’s in my history (hit and miss rate based on starts and or games played as a rate) and this time I wanted to try a different view.
You get paid more the higher you're drafted and have more guaranteed compensation. The idea someone doesn't want to get drafted would be rare instances where they're on the back end of the draft and feel their skillset is best suited for a particular team, or there's less competition, so they could choose instead.
I’m just telling you what it’s called because you didn’t know. Also I was wrong, it’s a “tree map”. The block thing is called a tree map. https://www.tableau.com/data-insights/reference-library/visual-analytics/charts/treemaps
Snap count per round would be an interesting stat. I'm sure you get plenty of UDFA that play on special teams and just because they technically played in a game doesn't meant they played anywhere close to the 2nd round guy.
Snap count per round would paint a much more accurate picture.
Agreed, this would be a better metric to use
I'd also wonder if the position played varied by round. Like kickers might be more likely to go 5th round (or whatever) and are more likely to have long careers than most other positions.
I was going to ask "what if you changed it to played in at least 2 games?" or "started in a game?" But I think you're on to something - this would be a good metric
Is round 3 larger than round two because of comp picks?
Not sure how big of a factor it would be, but I imagine R2 is where a lot of guys who were slated to be R1 (high talent) who slid due to injury/personal issues fall, and those issues might contribute to less game appearances.
Probably not. Sports drafts are complex mechanisms and do not necessarily reflect a simple formula where better players are picked first. Certain positions (like QB) are more highly valued but more likely to be boom/bust, whereas RBs are valued but because they have short careers and are plentiful, they are often drafted later (e.g. 3rd rd). Teams utilize a lot of RBs because they get injured a lot. Meanwhile you have specialists like Ks/Ps who might be drafted in rd 7 but have 15-yr careers because their positions are not as punishing. That one-game-minimum criterion will skew the data further toward the later part of he draft than would, say, a 30-game minimum (and even more so 120). There might be a lot of players in that dataset who had their "cup of coffee" in the league due simply to an injury situation. For anyone outside the US or not into sports, the most significant bias in the metric is that by far the largest pool of players is the "undrafted" group. Every other group is limited to roughly 30 players per year but undrafted has no cap. A lot of those undrafted players are capable of playing in the league and there are many on practice squads partly because they are cheaper and may be as good or marginally worse than drafted players. Sewing these players called up of a single game or two late in the season as a fill-in is not uncommon. Roster management is, in great part, a cost-mangement exercise, not only a talent-maximizing exercise. Also, teams out of contention for play-off spots might play more low-end players to keep their best players healthy. TLDR: There are too many mitigating factors on the data set to draw coherent conclusions in a TLDR.
>Probably not. Yes, the third round is larger than the second round because of comp picks. In the past three years the third round has had 28% more picks than the second round. Cc u/SabTab22
Yes, but I still say it is probably not simply due to that single effect. The entire point of my response is that it's not so straightforward. Edit: that said, 28% is a larger than I'd thought.
They are drafting humans, so it’s not an exact science and there are tons of factors at play. There are no r-squares of 1.00 around a sole factor when dealing with people. However, nothing is more correlative of pro success than the spot in the draft in which the player was selected (in part because of the talent of higher picks, and in part because of sunk cost fallacy). The fact that round three is the only round where we see an increase in players has more to do with the fact that round three is the only round where we jump from no comp picks to comp picks, causing the pool of players to be 28% higher then round two. u/SabTab22 has the right assumption.
This title confused the hell out of me. I get it now. It’s saying “of the active NFL players who played one game, this is where they were/were not drafted”.
Thanks. I was looking through the comments for someone who could explain why anybody would have played a game in the NFL last year, then been in the draft this year.
Is it because a lot of undrafted players play a game or a few games as a trial? Does it change if you go by count(games) rather than count(players)? (I know nothing about NFL so that might be completely wrong)
No, it's because the number of players in each round is a finite 32. The most recent figure I found is that there's roughly 71,000 college football players in the US. 7 rounds * 32 teams = 224 players drafted each year. So roughly 0.3% of the population is represented in the visualization of rounds 1-7, while the remaining 99.7% is represented in the undrafted population. Now, there's plenty of criticism of that breakdown. Just off the cuff, 1) most Division II, III, and even most D-I players will never sniff an NFL stadium, 2) only a small portion of players who don't get drafted declare for the draft or even attempt to play in the NFL, and 3) undrafted players frequently play college ball for more than one year so they'd be double-, triple-, or even quadruple-counted whereas drafted players would only count once. ...but any way you slice it, the reason for the seemingly high number of undrafted players is the sheer volume of undrafted players vs. a relatively very small number of drafted players. This visualization makes it look like undrafted players are more likely to play in the NFL, which couldn't be further from the truth.
Minor correction: due to comp picks, there aren’t 32 picks in each round. That’s probably why there are more 3rd round players than 2nd round players in the visualization (37 3rd round picks this year vs. 32 2nd rounders, for instance)
Ah, indeed. Thank you.
You…didn’t answer that guys’ question at all. The question was whether just counting players who only played at least one game would give different results than counting the number of games that players participated in. I suspect the number would be substantially different. Lots of third and fourth string players, who are more likely to be the undrafted ones, only get into one or two games per season due to injuries or other reasons.
The population of NCAA players is completely irrelevant. You would want to look at the number of players that declare for the draft compared to the number picked.
If you go by games played, the undrafted % decreased to 26%, if you go by games started it decreases to 13% of total. The average undrafted player who played, played in 10.1 games out of the 17-game seasons. The average drafted player, played in 12.6.
Thanks for those follow up stats, I guess it makes sense that undrafted players would be less likely to make the starting team.
Would be interested to see this filtered only for offense/defense snaps, rather include special teams players. Also could be cool to understand the % by players who played the majority of snaps at their position.
The undrafted rate drops to 28% when you exclude punters, kickers and long snappers. There is a note on the bottom of the area chart.
Yes but that is only excluding special team specific positions, not all players who play only special team snaps
I bet it changes a lot by position. Like Oline probably does not have very many undrafted players, whereas P/K is probably almost all undrafted.
So you are saying I have a chance? 37 years old, 6'1", 170 lbs, 7.47 second forty, and I can do both pushups. My only real drawback is that I have terrible hands and poor situational awareness, I would make a terrible coach on the field, and I lack that will to win.
6’1’’, 170. Absolutely. The blue print for your size is out there. 10 guys just like you have done it. Check for yourself. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/s/HPXLOqOGsm
Where does the other 1% come from or are these numbers rounded and there are unseen decimals that make it add up to 100?
It’s rounding
Does this include pre-season games? I'm thinking round 5-7 guys have the best chance to get beat out by UDFAs in training camp and since a team may draft 3-6 guys in rounds 5-7, the team will sign roughly 10 UDFAs after the draft. Nice visual though, never even considered this.
This needs to be represented as the percentage of each class that gets to play otherwise it is meaningless
Source: [pro football reference](https://www.pro-football-reference.com/draft/) Chart: excel
So each round of the draft has picks fewer players than the previous round? Meaning some teams aren't getting 1 pick in each round? I realize that trades happen, but I just assumed every team had a pick in each round. I think the NBA does a simpler draft so maybe that's what I expected here.
No, with each round, the talent is reduced and the players chances of making the roster dwindle as well. On average, each team has one pick per round, but circumstances can also change that.
I don’t know if this is how I read it or it was intended this way but this seems slightly misleading. To me this post makes it seem like it’s preferable to go undrafted because you have a greater chance of playing in the nfl if you are undrafted. While the stat is probably true the opposite is true, the higher you are drafted the greater your chances of making and playing for an nfl team are.
If 30% of the NFL goes undrafted, then that means 70% are drafted. It’s preferable to be drafted.
Yes, but a single player can only be drafted in a single round, or go undrafted. The way this is presented it looks like as a draftee you would want to go undrafted. Undrafted has more than double the percent of any other single round, and more total players than any other round. I think a good companion stat is what percent of players from each round make/play in the nfl. First round players are probably around 95% going down from there with 6th and 7th round players making the team 30% of the time.
Right, I’m just telling you the simple math. If 30% go undrafted, the flip side is that 70% get drafted. I’ve done what you’re suggesting, it’s in my history (hit and miss rate based on starts and or games played as a rate) and this time I wanted to try a different view.
You get paid more the higher you're drafted and have more guaranteed compensation. The idea someone doesn't want to get drafted would be rare instances where they're on the back end of the draft and feel their skillset is best suited for a particular team, or there's less competition, so they could choose instead.
the bar graph is a way easier way to visualize this. also, normally I'm not a fan of pie charts, but they're way better than this block thing...
That why it’s there, so you can choose your preference. This “block thing” is called an area chart.
it's a significantly less effective way of visualizing percentage-based data.
I’m just telling you what it’s called because you didn’t know. Also I was wrong, it’s a “tree map”. The block thing is called a tree map. https://www.tableau.com/data-insights/reference-library/visual-analytics/charts/treemaps