first-round overview
On Thursday, April 28th, NFL fans around the world tuned in to see thirty-two life-changing draft picks, filled with surprises across the league. On what was a typically unpredictable night, we saw a large run on receivers in the first round, with six going off the board early. The Georgia Bulldog defense had a strong night with a record-breaking five defenders being drafted in the first round. The night for quarterbacks was predicted to be pretty quiet, but still the low expectations were still shattered with only one quarterback whose name was called. Two surprising moves were made across the league, with both AJ and Marquise Brown being sent tp the NFC, displaying the ripple effect that has shattered the wide receiver market across the league. In all, the night was exciting for Team Draft, considering the year's worth of work that was spent leading up to round one.
Beginning with the first pick to the Jacksonville Jaguars, Team Draft predicted, analyzed, and reviewed every pick of the draft, complete with call-ins from local fans and opinions about how each player will perform throughout their careers. You can review how our mock-draft stacked up to the real draft below, or listen back to our live recording of the draft with the link below.
Beginning with the first pick to the Jacksonville Jaguars, Team Draft predicted, analyzed, and reviewed every pick of the draft, complete with call-ins from local fans and opinions about how each player will perform throughout their careers. You can review how our mock-draft stacked up to the real draft below, or listen back to our live recording of the draft with the link below.
After a year of data collection and modeling, our model was complete. With a big-board style ranking of every player at our disposal, we were able to make the Team Draft official first-round mock draft. At first glance, the mock looks, frankly, kind of ridiculous. Especially comparing it to the actual results of the first-round, we didn't get a ton right. The key, though, is that our mock draft was not predictive for draft night. Our model used the pre-draft statistics to predict the future PFF grades of each player in this draft class; this means that we are predicting the success of these players at the peak years of their career. For example, we knew that Travon Walker would go in the top-three, there was no doubt about that. Still, though, we mocked him down to pick eight because our model thought his success would not be as high as many players above him. This is why players like Derek Stingley Jr. and Kyle Hamilton fell so far in our mock - we will only be able to evaluate the success of this model and mock-draft in three to four to five years, when we see how each player's career pans out. Our mock also left out trades, which were a big part of the night but are nearly impossible to predict. We did have some very exciting and surprisingly correct predictions. To hear our reflections on how our model performed, check out episode five of the Team Draft podcast.