Which NFL Draft position has the highest hit rate?

TAMPA, FL - OCTOBER 15: Jack Campbell #46 of the Detroit Lions celebrates after a play during the fourth quarter of an NFL football game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Raymond James Stadium on October 15, 2023 in Tampa, Florida. (Photo by Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images) | Getty Images

Nobody wants to be a fan of a team that walks away from the NFL Draft with a bust. The NFL is dictated by teams that consistently draft successfully, both by finding Pro Bowl talent in the first round, then adding valuable starters or contributors throughout the rest of the rounds. Miss on those picks and you squander opportunity, make too many of them and your team tumbles down the standings.

“Bust” is a universal, albeit subjective phrase that’s too often applied to skill position players and rarely anybody else. Everyone knows the name “JaMarcus Russell,” but what about defensive tackle Justin Harrell who went No. 16 in the same class? Harrell managed to only start two games in his career and register 27 total tackles in three years before being out of the NFL. Harrell was an objectively worse player than Russell, but he wasn’t as damaging to the Green Bay Packers because of his position. Make no mistake, the man was still a bust.

That’s what prompted me to dive into the last 15 years of NFL Draft data from the first round to look at the hits, busts, and everything in between at every position that has been selected. The goal was to find out which positions are safer, routinely netting more long-serving, consistent talent — and those which have had a tendency to fail more often.

There’s no perfect metric to evaluate a player’s entire career, but perhaps the best we have is “Approximate Value (AV)” from Pro Football Reference. This uses a complex formula (found here) to quantify a player’s impact over the course of their career. From there, we can also look critically at drafted AV, which is the value added to the team that took the player. That’s how we avoid cases like Sam Darnold or Baker Mayfield, who were busts for the teams that drafted them — but had success elsewhere. In this way we can measure the draft fit.

The final elements are the Mean AV, which removes the highest 5% and lowest 5% of players to ensure that guys like Patrick Mahomes or Josh Allen don’t skew the values too much, and finally the Pro Bowl Threshold AV — which averages out what a typical Pro Bowler at the position has as their AV. This is used as a yardstick because by nature AV isn’t designed to be a 1-to-1 comparison between positions.

What does this all mean?

There are really two factors you want to look at to determine the risk of a pick: Firstly, the Mean AV, which this table is sorted by. This is the average approximate value a position has given the team taking him over the last 15 years, and the second is comparing that to the Pro Bowl Threshold for the position. This gives a picture of the chance you’ll get a bust, as well as the chance you’ll get a Pro Bowl caliber talent.

For example, the average linebacker selected in the first round is almost at the threshold to become a Pro Bowler. This position represents an exceptionally safe pick. We can debate the upside of box linebackers in the modern NFL, but the numbers bear out that if you take a first-round linebacker you’ll likely see success.

Conversely, wide receiver is a minefield. Not only does the position rank lowest in terms of finding long-term success, but on average, less than a third of drafted 1st round receivers go on to become Pro Bowl-caliber talents. Quarterback and edge rushers are also risky positions to draft, with fewer than 50% of drafted 1st round talents going on to be Pro Bowl quality players.

Perhaps the most fascinating position to look at here is cornerback. The hit rate in terms of finding Pro Bowl talent at corner is relatively high in terms of first-round success, but overall, the position grades lower than many others in career value. This could indicate that corners tend to have a smaller window of effective high-level play, which is an area to explore next — but this data didn’t look into the career length of different positions.

There’s one large inference we can make from this data, and it seems to bear out when we look at NFL teams anecdotally: If you are trying to build a team from the ground up its best to invest picks in the trenches first. These have higher relative hit rates to build the foundation of a team. Meanwhile it’s incredibly risky for a bad team in need of a lot of help to roll the dice on a receiver or quarterback without the other pieces in place, because that does open the organization up to more busts — thereby setting them back further.

When the dust settles, the NFL Draft remains an imprecise science. This data shows what has happened across the league over the years, but ultimately a talented front office and scouting department can buck league-wide trends to consistently find the effective players and build winning organizations.