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Journal of Quantitative Analysis in
Sports
Manuscript 1329
An Alternative to the NFL Draft Pick Value
Chart Based upon Player Performance
Michael Schuckers, St. Lawrence University
©2011 American Statistical Association. All rights reserved.
An Alternative to the NFL Draft Pick Value
Chart Based upon Player Performance
Michael Schuckers
Abstract
In this paper, we consider the National Football League Pick Value Chart and propose an
alternative. The current Pick Value Chart was created approximately 20 years ago and has been
used since to determine the value of draft selections for trading of draft selections. For this paper,
we analyze the first 255 draft selections for the years 1991 to 2001. As part of our analysis, we
consider four non-position dependent metrics to measure and model player performance at each of
the first 255 draft selections. We perform a nonparametric regression of each performance metric
onto player's selections. A comparison is then made between each fitted line and the Pick Value
Chart. Having considered these comparisons, we propose an alternative Pick Value Chart.
KEYWORDS: National Football League, draft, nonparametric regression, performance, football,
LOESS
1 Introduction
The National Football League (NFL) is a professional league of American Football
based in the United States. Each year the NFL allocates eligible players among
its teams via a draft. In each round, each of the 32 teams selects a single player.
The order of team selections is based upon the previous year’s performance. Teams
can trade their draft selections for players or for future draft selections or for a
combination of these two. Additionally, teams can be given draft picks at the end
of rounds as compensation for losing current players to free agency. In 2010, the
NFL draft had seven rounds and a total of 255 players were selected.
Sometime around 1990, the Pick Value Chart (PVC), or The Chart
(Massey and Thaler, 2010) , was introduced as a way of assigning value to each
draft selection. Figure 1 plots the value of the PVC against a players selection. (A
complete version of the PVC is found in Table 5 at the end of this article.) This chart
allowed teams to have a single currency for determining if a trade of draft picks pro-
vided equivalent value. McGuire (2010) states the that original PVC was developed
by Jimmy Johnson who coached the Dallas Cowboys from 1989 to 1999. Johnson
supposedly used historical trade data to devise the PVC (Smith, 2007) . Recently,
Massey and Thaler (2010) evaluated the PVC on the basis of the value of subse-
quent contracts awarded to players to determine that the PVC overvalues early draft
selections particularly those in the beginning of the first round of selections. Berry
(2001) looked at comparing success rates for first round picks across a variety of
sports where success was defined by making an All-Star team. Others who have
looked at creating updated versions of the PVC include Stuart (2008) and Maier
(2010) though these versions primarily involved minor modifications to the current
PVC. In this paper we show that the PVC is not reflective of player performance and
we provide an alternative chart to the PVC based on past player performance. The
remainder of this paper is organized in the following way. Section 2 discussion the
notation and variables that we will use here and gives univariate summaries of our
performance metrics. Section 3 compared the PVC to other performance metrics.
We create an alternative version of the PVC and discuss it in Section 4. A summary
of the work here as well as a discussion are summarized in Section 5. An appendix
that contains a copy of the PVC as well as our alternative is found in Section 6.
2 Data
The data that we will use to evaluate the PVC comes from
Pro-Football-Reference.com Pro Football Reference (2010) . We are using
every player selected among the first 255 players in the NFL drafts that occurred
1
Schuckers: Alternative NFL Pick Value Chart