The best way to grade drafts

It’s all about the number of picks. Huh.

But there is a very, very simple measure that will give you a better sense of whose draft will be good and which ones will be bad: just count how many picks each team makes. It may seem too simple to be true, but in looking back at the 2004, 2005 and 2006 drafts with the benefit of our current hindsight, you would have done a better job of ranking the drafts from No. 1 to No. 32 by simply counting each team’s number of picks, rather than listening to the draft experts’ instant grades.

We’ll include all the statistics later for those who want to check the math, but we ran the drafts through two formulas to determine successful vs. unsuccessful drafts. The first gave points for rankings for games played (by draftees), games started and career approximate value with bonuses for Pro Bowl appearances (five points) and first-team All-Pro appearances (10 points). The best team in the league in each category received 32 points with descending scoring so that the worst team in a category received one point. It was the same formula that we used to grade the drafts for our post-draft grade report yesterday.