Do First-Round Picks Really Matter?
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by user Drpatriot
It was June 6, 2006 and I had signed up for ArmchairGM about three days before. I had just published my first article on this website, a snazzy little piece about the impact of first-round picks in the NFL.
A lot has changed since then. Manny Stiles has entered ArmchairGM folklore. The dreaded Indianapolis Colts have won a Super Bowl. And finally, the statistics and I have grown a year older. For this reason, I have decided to revisit the age-old question that I posed in my very first article:
Do first-round picks really matter to a team's success in the NFL?
There are a few problems with this essential question. Firstly, what is success, really? I categorized success in three different categories: regular season success, postseason appearances, and Super Bowls.
Secondly, how does one determine what makes a first-round pick "successful" or not? I kept my original system for this category for my new analysis. I rated picks from 0-4 based on their performance with the team that drafted them. A player with a "0" had virtually no impact and is no longer with the team. A player with a "1" never became a consistent starter and remains a backup in the NFL. A player with a "2" is an average starter in the NFL. A player with a "3" is a player with a good amount of success in the NFL. A player with a "4" is a consistent Pro Bowl player.
Thirdly, how does one determine how any of this matters to a team's success? Last year, I took the average and median rankings of a team's first-round picks and divided them by the league-wide first-round pick's score. This gave a "success rate" of sorts that helped define where teams stood in comparison to the others. I then compared this to their win percentage during the used timespan to see how much difference there was between the two. With updated win percentages for this year, I did this comparison again to see the difference.
I was unsatisfied with the results, mostly because I don't feel that a team's success in the year 2000 has much to do with a team's draft pick in the year 2003. Because the entire span of first-round picks used was from 2000-2005, I changed the win % years from 2003-2006. This hopefully gave a more realistic result, as teams will have time to create a solid foundation from their previous first-round picks while still adding more pieces to the puzzle.
The results of this are displayed below. The "AS" column displays a team's average success in the first round. The "MS" colum displays a team's median success in the first round. The "TS" column displays their overall success rate as described above. I believe the other columns are quite straightforward.
That is as far as I took it with regular-season success last year, and I now feel that it didn't really answer the question. Sure, it is clear that teams with better drafts (Indianapolis, New England, etc.) had better success. But what does it really mean? To figure this out, I took the correlation between all teams's success rates and their win percentages.
The correlation between wins and success rate in the first round was a positive .581. I am not going to pretend to be a statistical genius, but that's a pretty strong correlation that I believe speaks for itself. I reached the same conclusion here that I did in last year's column, but with much more conviction: success in the first round is a major determinant in a team's success in the regular season.
Then we come to post-season success. The average team has won 1.375 postseason games. The New England Patriots lead the league with 8 postseason wins, followed closely by the Blue Toilets with 7.
The statistics here are simple. Teams who have 3 or more postseason wins since 2003 have a 58.6% success rate in the first round. Teams who have not won a postseason game since 2003 have a 47.1% success rate in the first round. This difference is further escalated by the fact that teams with 3 or more postseason wins since 2003 are drafting consistently at the bottom of the 1st round, whereas teams without any postseason wins are drafting higher. This point, once again, is proven decisively: selecting well in the first round is important to doing well in the postseason.
Finally, we look at the big one: Super Bowls. Because of the limited timespan of this analysis, I decided to include all Super Bowl appearances, not just Super Bowl wins, in this category as to get more data. This distinction is ven more clear cut than the first one. Teams who have played in the Super Bowl since 2003 have a 66.8% success rate in the first round. Teams who have not played in the Super Bowl since 2003 have a 46.9% success rate in the first round. That's a full 20%, folks. It's very clear: selecting well in the first round is extremely important to being on the world's biggest stage, the Super Bowl.
So what does this mean for NFL teams? Smarten up their first-round drafting, because it's clearly important to any and all amounts of success in the NFL.
You hear me, Matt Millen?
