History of the 12th pick overall in the NFL draft

The 12th pick overall is where the Saints pick this year. There’s been some enormously successful hits in that slot over the history of the pick, including some very recently. Interestingly the Saints have only picked 12th overall twice in the history of the franchise. Both times they went with a tackle and the results were mixed.

In 1980 the Saints took tackle Stan Brock out of Colorado. You’ll remember Brock came on our podcast back in January 2015, a little over a year ago. Besides Marques Colston, I’d say Brock is the best Saints player to never make a Pro Bowl – so that pick turned out to be a very solid one. Brock played 13 seasons for the Saints and was always a mainstay on the line. In fact, he played well deep into his career for three years on the San Diego Chargers too.

In 1975 the Saints took Kurt Schumacher out of Ohio State. He would only start 13 games for the Saints over 3 seasons before playing part of one season in Tampa and ending his NFL career. Needless to say that was a bust of a pick. So the Saints are hitting .500 with that selection.

Here is the history of the 12th overall pick.

Some superstar all timers on this list that include Joe Namath, Clay Matthews, Jim Lachey, Ken Harvey, current Saints DB coach Aaron Glenn, Warren Sapp, Warrick Dunn, Keith Brooking, Jonathan Vilma (drafted by the Jets), Shawne Merriman, Haloti Ngata, Ryan Clady and Odell Beckham, Jr. Enough star power on that list right there to make your mouth water. But then there’s also the D. J. Haydens, Christian Ponders and Cade McNowns. So the 12th pick is no guarantee.

But wait that’s not all, in an effort to truly go all out geek mode, I’ve given each pick since 1990 a letter grade that will work like this. A = home run pick (4.00). B = solid NFL player (3.00). C = average/mediocre pick (2.00). D = bad pick (1.00) and F = complete bust (0.00).

Keep in mind I did this same exercise with the 27th pick in 2014 and it yielded a 2.21 GPA since 1990. Last year I did it with the 13th and 31st pick (13th pick since 1990, 31st pick since 1999) and the GPAs were 3.16 and 2.90 respectively. Interesting to point out that, as expected, the 13th pick graded out much better than the 27th pick since 1990, but the 31st pick was much better than the 27th.

I’ll spare you all the exact grades, but to give you a sense, for the sake of this exercise I gave Odell Beckham Jr. an “A”, Ryan Mathews a “B+” and Regan Upshaw (for example) a B-. There’s not enough data on Danny Shelton yet, but I gave him a C- for the time being. The GPA for this pick was 2.80 since 1990. There were a lot of A’s, mind you (Beckham, Clady, Ngata, Merriman, Vilma, Brooking, Dunn, Sapp) but a lot of terrible grades too (Hayden, Bryant, McNown, Bates, Ponder). That means it graded out since 1990 as slightly worse than the 31st overall pick and much worse than the 13th pick one slot behind. Surprising. Definitely feels like it’s been feast or famine picking 12th for teams in recent years.

Over the last 26 years the 12th pick has been defensive on 17 occasions compared to just 9 on offense. This pick definitely seems more heavily weighted towards defense. Of those 17 defensive picks, 10 were defensive linemen, 4 were linebackers and 3 were defensive backs. Of the 9 offensive players, 4 were running backs, two were quarterbacks, two were receivers and one was an offensive lineman. So 38.5% of the players taken in that slot were defensive linemen, followed by linebacker and running back taking up a distant 15.4%.

So based on all this information, how are you feeling about the 12th pick? Better or worse?