Grading the 2005 NFL Draft Grades

Every year the experts like to immediately grade each teams' NFL draft. I've always thought these are useless, because the experts really have no idea which players are going to be good. So I thought I would grade a past draft.

I randomly picked 2005. It's long ago enough that we have a good idea which players turned out good or not. It's also near enough that I found some draft grades online. I decided to compare to SI's Dr. Z 2005 draft grades.

I figure that for each draft a team can only do as well as the players that are available, so each draft is its own entity. I took a look at the Approximate Value* from Pro-Football-Reference.com 's 2005 Draft summary. The top picks that year were guys like DeMarcus Ware, Aaron Rodgers, Roddy White, Logan Mankins and Frank Gore. I am going to give any of the top-32 AV players a grade of "A". Any player who is 33-64 in career AV (through 2011) gets a "B". 65-96 gets a "C". 97-128 gets a "D". Anybody ranking lower gets an "F".  

* One note about AV: PFR doesn't calculate AV for punters or kickers.  There were 5 of those drafted and are classified as "F's" in my study, but aren't necessarily.  So teams like Jets (Mike Nugent) and Chiefs (Dustin Colquitt) are graded a bit lower than they should be.

I totaled up the GPA for each team. Here's how that shakes out:
Team GPA Grade 
DAL 2.75 C+
NYG 2.50 C
NWE 2.29 C-
SDG 2.29 C-
CHI 2.17 C-
MIA 2.17 C-
ATL 2.00 C-
PHI 1.64 D
TEN 1.64 D
SFO 1.45 D
NYJ 1.38 D
PIT 1.38 D
STL 1.36 D
WAS 1.33 D
JAX 1.25 D-
SEA 1.22 D-
DEN 1.17 D-
ARI 1.14 D-
BAL 1.14 D-
OAK 1.14 D-
CAR 1.10 D-
CIN 1.00 D-
CLE 1.00 D-
GNB 1.00 D-
NOR 0.86 F
DET 0.83 F
HOU 0.83 F
TAM 0.83 F
IND 0.70 F
MIN 0.57 F
KAN 0.56 F
BUF 0.50 F

Lots of bad grades here. This is because with 7 picks per team (before any trades), only a few end up being NFL players, so all the guys who never play in an NFL game really drag down the average. So in order to get a fair grade, we really need to compare actual GPA to expected GPA. In a perfect draft, we would expect every team to get an "A" player in the first round, a "B" player in the second round, etc. But then teams trade draft picks around, so their expected GPA's will all be different. Kansas City had the lowest expected GPA because they had no pick at all in the second round. Minnesota had the highest ExGPA because they had 2 first-round picks, and no fifth-round picks (to bring the average down).

Here are the expected GPAs for all teams:
Team ExGPA
MIN 2.00
SDG 1.71
ARI 1.71
MIA 1.67
DAL 1.63
BAL 1.57
OAK 1.57
NYG 1.50
WAS 1.50
DEN 1.50
DET 1.50
CIN 1.43
NOR 1.43
CHI 1.33
SEA 1.33
NWE 1.29
PHI 1.27
TEN 1.27
ATL 1.25
PIT 1.25
JAX 1.25
CLE 1.25
CAR 1.20
STL 1.18
HOU 1.17
NYJ 1.13
IND 1.10
GNB 1.09
SFO 1.00
TAM 1.00
BUF 1.00
KAN 0.78

The next step is to compare these numbers. Which teams did the best (or worst) compared to their expected values? I subtracted the actual GPA from the Expected GPA, and here's what we get:

Team Var
DAL 1.13 A
NYG 1.00 A
NWE 1.00 A
CHI 0.83 A
ATL 0.75 A
SDG 0.57 A
MIA 0.50 B
SFO 0.45 B
PHI 0.36 B
TEN 0.36 B
NYJ 0.25 B
STL 0.18 B
PIT 0.13 B
JAX 0.00 B
GNB (0.09) C
CAR (0.10) C
SEA (0.11) C
TAM (0.17) C
WAS (0.17) C
KAN (0.22) C
CLE (0.25) C
DEN (0.33) C
HOU (0.33) C
IND (0.40) C
BAL (0.43) C
OAK (0.43) C
CIN (0.43) C
BUF (0.50) C
ARI (0.57) C
NOR (0.57) C
DET (0.67) D
MIN (1.43) F

Jacksonville had a GPA exactly equal to what we expected them to do! Minnesota had those 2 picks in the first round, but Troy Williamson (D) and Erasmus James (D) never contributed much in the NFL.  They were 2 of the 3 worst players picked in the first round.  The third guy David Pollack picked by Cincinnati. 

Dallas scored big with DeMarcus Ware (A) and Marcus Spears (B) in the first round. They had 4 other picks that were A's or B's! Out of 8 draft selections, 6 of them earned A's or B's.

 Using the standard deviation for these grades (0.57), any team who had a variance above 0.56 gets an A. (-0.2) to .55 gets a B, etc.

 Dr. Z was a little vague in some of his grades, giving teams a B-/C+ (Conditional), etc. But I count 23 teams that he awarded a B or an A. I only awarded 14 such grades. He didn't give out any F's and only gave Denver a D. There are 27 teams which he graded within one grade of their actual grade, and 9 teams that graded out exactly as he predicted. Overall, it looks like he didn't do too bad a job of grading the draft. The biggest discrepancy was with Minnesota. He gave them an A and rated them with the best draft, when they actually had the worst draft. None of the Vikings' picks earned higher than a D. DT C.J. Mosley was their best pick with a career AV of just 10. Here was Dr. Z's summary for the Vikings:

VIKINGS -- Where do we start? Top pick Troy Williamson goes deep and doesn't walk off the field while the game's going on. The other first-rounder, Erasmus James, should have been the first outside rusher selected. Instead the Vikes got lucky and he was the fourth. Marcus Johnson is a serious mauler at either guard or tackle. Dustin Fox -- a cornerback or safety, take your pick -- vertically jumped 43 1/2...

His biggest misses in the other direction were the Giants and Bears who he graded out as "C" drafts, while they turned out to be "A" drafts behind picks such as: Kyle Orton, Cedric Benson, Chris Harris, Justin Tuck, Corey Webster and Brandon Jacobs. He said the Bears blew it by not helping their offensive line. He mainly downgraded the Giants because they only had 4 picks (due to the Eli Manning trade the year before), and not having much faith in Justin Tuck.