No Team Can Beat the Draft

[Danger Zone]

…once again, there’s virtually no relationship between how well a GM drafts, relative to average, from one year to the next.

Players routinely play better — and worse — than these long-term averages. But teams can’t regularly predict which prospects will outperform or underperform relative to where they were drafted.

If teams showed any consistency in their ability to out-draft the market, it would show up in these deviations. But, as Chase Stuart of FootballPerspective.com has also found, there’s practically no correlation between a team’s picking performance from one draft to the next.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/no-team-can-beat-the-draft/
-Article by Neil Pain

So maybe this means even I could do just as well as the professional NFL GM!

It’s not that all GMs are stupid or blindly lucky, it’s that scouting is so good that there are no “steals” left to find.

If you threw 31 random fans and a GM into a draft, I’m sure that one GM would do very well most years. But graded against 31 other GMs who are focused on the exact same goal, consistently beating the pack is an unrealistic expectation.

Http://www.footballperspective.com/are-certain-teams-better-at-drafting-than-others/
-Article by Jodi Beggs

Ok fine. Maybe thats not what they are saying here.

 

[jmt57]

Interesting ... especially in response to those that detest the theory of accumulating picks by trading down, and espouse a philosophy of trading up for an impact player to put a contender over the top.

 

[AzPatsFan]

By this thesis, 13 years of winning 11+ games /season is impossible. Thanks I needed that info.

 

[Danger Zone]

By this thesis, 13 years of winning 11+ games /season is impossible. Thanks I needed that info.

I don't think the report says this at all. It is saying that no one GM has had consistently better success in the draft than any other.

 

[RayClay]

I don't think the report says this at all. It is saying that no one GM has had consistently better success in the draft than any other.

If by success, you mean winning games and you counter weigh draft success by draft position (naturally worse for the team winning most often) it's indisputable.

Of course, in the stock market where there are less variables (there is no year when a stock picker doesn't have room for more money) Buffet and many others dump all over the efficient market hypothesis.

Unlike the stock market, a player isn't bought and sold, he must become part of a team and the success of that, year to year, has a tremendous effect on how successful he will be.

 

[RayClay]

I don't think the report says this at all. It is saying that no one GM has had consistently better success in the draft than any other.

There is success in the draft independent of winning football games? Are we talking fantasy leagues?