Catching an Optimal Draft Pick like 1-3: Formulating a Valuation Policy for Wide Receivers in the NFL

Abstract

The NFL draft is a critical recruiting process that has strong, season-improving implications for every team in the league, but especially the worst. The process of the draft has been established so that a team’s pick position is directly related to their resulting performance in the previous season. The draft was structured in this fashion in order to eliminate competition amongst team’s for individual college talent and to essentially give weaker team’s within the league the opportunity to select the best talent available from the incoming rookie class of draftees in order that they can potentially enhance their roster to improve performance in the upcoming season. NFL teams’ executives need to be confident in their decision making due to the large magnitude of effect the draft pick will have on the performance of future season, which will in turn have an effect on the current roster of player, the market base of fans who support the team, and ultimately the status of their job. While there exists ample data and information that is available for scouts to leverage, it has been discovered by other scholars studying the NFL draft , using data analytics to investigate the relationship between career success and the position at which a player was selected in draft, that scouts and team executives are not making optimal decisions. This is the following objective of this study: to build upon the previously established foundation of work done by other scholars in order to develop a unique valuation policy specifically for selecting the position of wide receiver in the NFL draft.