The first part of the PiRate Ratings NFL updates every year is to grade the NFL Draft. Years ago, I reverse engineered the system I have used ever since to assign each team a score between 0.0 and 5.0.
Without boring everybody with a lengthy explanation for how I come to a draft score for each team, the basics are:
1. I use 8 different pre-season Draft experts’ grading of every player that was drafted along with any unrestricted free agents that signed and carry a grade high enough to matter.
2. In each round, there is a different top score, with the higher the round, the more potential score is available. If a team drafts a top player in the first round, it counts more than if a team drafts the best possible remaining player in the 4th round, but if a team drafts a 1st round talent that falls to the 2nd round, they can score a bonus.
3. If a team doesn’t have a pick in a round, they are not really penalized, but if a team trades down in the draft for more picks than they had, they get a bonus. The reason for this is that 1/3 of all picks in the higher rounds never pan out. The best draft option is to pile up total picks. In other words, the Mike Ditka trade of his entire draft class to Washington for the rights to draft Ricky Williams counts as the worst grade in the history of the NFL Draft. The San Francisco 49ers had the best ever draft in 1986, and they traded down 6 times, eventually drafting eight starters on their Super Bowl Championship teams in 1988 and 1989.
4. The hand-picked draft gurus were selected by looking at what they had predicted in prior years and how accurate their picks turned out to be. If, for example, they gave a 4th round selection glaring grades and panned a 1st round pick as a mistake, and they were shown in later years to be correct, they made my grade to trust as a guru (a lot more in-depth than this one example).
The top grade, 5.0, is not necessarily a perfect draft, just one that has the best chance to pay off in the first year. A grade of 0.0 is the least chance to pay off in the first year. Down the road, these draft classes may be great or terrible, but since the ratings are only constructed to begin the current season, future potential is of no consequence.
Here, in order of best to worst, are the draft grades for each team.
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