2018 Five Year Draft Scores

 With the draft this weekend and then all the grading afterwards I wanted to look back at the 2018 draft and measure how teams did.  I used the numbers provided by Pro-Football-Reference.  When you look at a draft it lists all those players drafted but also the value each player generated for their draft team as well as for their career.  I thought it would be fun to take a look at this.  

I've also put with each team what their draft grade was according to BleacherReport after the draft had completed, just to give us an idea of what people were thinking in the moment.  

First we will look at the teams Total Draft Score.  This is the amount of value the team added to their Team from the draft over the last 5 years.  I slightly adjusted the values from Pro-Football-Reference by making a slight adjustment for where someone was picked in the draft.  For instance if you were picked 100th overall and you have accumulated a value of 10 during these 5 years, I adjusted it to 11.

The Colts, Ravens, and Bills all scored high on this one getting an A on the draft.  The Colts and Ravens both had more than 10 picks in the draft, but they made the most of those picks.  Compare that to a team like the Rams who also had 11 picks and only generated 72.291 value from those picks.  

Another way of looking at it is to look at simply who drafted the best players.  We can do this by looking at the Player Total Draft Score.  There is some movement here.  For example Baltimore moves to the top of the list.  I don't have an easy way to measure value back from comp picks or trades, so I haven't made any adjustments for this, but for instance Baltimore drafted Hayden Hurst, Orlando Brown Jr., and Kenny Young who have all accumulated quite a bit of value with other teams.  

The problem with looking at total points is that it favors the teams who had more picks in the draft.  So what if we looked at it from a Value Per Pick perspective, using the Total Draft Score number.  

By doing this you can see it helps some teams, like Philadelphia who I scored a B in total draft score but an A in per player.  And hurts others like New England who scored a C in total draft score, but a D in per player.  Tennessee gets the biggest boost going from a D to a B on this one.  That's the problem with limiting yourself to so few picks.  Even if those picks are good value, you are missing out on the total value you could have added to your team.  

The teams here who really underperformed when compared to their post draft grades was Arizona, New York Jets, and Green Bay.  The Cardinals and the Jets both drafted busts at QB in the top 10.  The Packers had 11 picks and came back with very little value.  

I would also say that this draft is a great informer as to how we look at Chris Ballard (Colts), Brandon Beane (Bills), Howie Roseman (Eagles), and Ozzie Newsome (Ravens) when it comes to the draft.  Baltimore has lived off of Newsome's reputation since he left after the 2018 season.  Ballard put a team around Andrew Luck that everyone had been wanting for his entire career and has lived off of that reputation since then.  The Eagles were coming off a Super Bowl win and Roseman was getting a ton of credit for their success, just as he did for there success in 2022.  Beane is seen by many as doing the best job of anyone at a complete rebuild of a roster from scratch.