Look back: My 2020 Draft Boards

Last year I posted a "What I got right" article looking at my application of this project to the 2018 and 2019 drafts. They were always going to be considered outliers because I started the project in 2020 and retroactively applied it to the 2018-19 classes. Since 2020 I've come out with two new versions of my draft board processes that I ended up applying back to this class, so below you will see two tables. The first table is a comparison between the three versions and the NFL. And the second table is a look at the players that have received an A, B or C grade through three seasons. I'll explain the tables more below. At the very bottom you will see my brief analysis on the first real look at the project, and a link to all the previous draft board articles.

The comparison table will have four column headers: 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 are in reference to the my three versions of draft boards with 1.0 being the original; and the last column will be NFL which is the NFL's comparison to each category you see on the left side. All of the percentages are the percent of successful players for each category.

Categories: Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3 is my way of organizing with the 3.0 version of the draft boards, for 1.0 and 2.0 I've converted 1st round to day 1, 1st/2nd and 2nd/3rd to day 2, and 3rd/5th, 4th/6th, 5th/7th and 7th/UD to day 3.

"On my Board and Successful": looks at the percent of the successful players that were still on my board, and for the NFL the # of successful compared to total drafted.

"Total of Successful and on my board" is the percent of successful on my board vs the total number of successful players, for the NFL it's the percent of successful that were drafted vs the total number of successful players.

"Removed/Undrafted" is the percent of players not on my board that succeeded, for the NFL that's the number of successful undrafted players compared to the number of combine players (non-special teams) that went undrafted (because comparing it to the number of undrafted players would be insane).  

Comparing Draft Boards

The Columns for the player board below include the 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and NFL like above, and below them is the draft round grade each successful player had on those boards (or the round they were actually drafted in for the NFL column). The final column is the grade they've received based on their play through the first two seasons, with only those getting at least a C qualifying as successful.

Successful Players

My takeaway: Version 1.0 was a nice foundation to get me started, especially when I was reminded that the original format for that version wasn't meant to determine who could be successful (those are the oldest boards you'll find in the link below, the "revised" ones are the ones referenced for 1.0). But it's pretty evident that v1.0 was never going to be the final answer. Version 2.0 had a lot more players removed from my board and that's why the percentages are so much higher. I feel like version 3.0 has found a nice balance between the two. It's also allowed me to account for level of college competition, which takes my opinion on the subject out of the equation. I also like seeing how well v3.0 stacks up against the results from the actual draft. As far as the players list goes, I'm really looking forward to the 6 year review. Based on how some of the above players have been trending, and a handful of players that just missed getting a 'C', I think the list could look a bit different come 2026.

Link to all the previous 2020 draft board articles: https://wetalkfootball.cc/tag/2020-draft-board/