Here's why the most valued position in the 2016 NFL Draft isn't quarterback
NFL teams sure did pick a lot of cornerbacks, but QBs were accounted for the top-2 selections in the draft. On which position did teams spend more draft capital?
By
Jared Dubin
•
3 min read
The 2016 NFL Draft is over. There were 253 players selected, from No. 1 pick Jared Goff to Mr. Irrelevant Kalan Reed. And while we can make educated guesses about how good those 253 players are going to be at the next level, we don't know for sure. We can't possibly know. What we do know, though, is how NFL teams valued those players. We know that information because we know the order in which they were selected.
All NFL teams use some version or another of a draft value chart. These charts assign a point value to every draft pick from No. 1 to No. 224 (32 teams x 7 rounds), and many teams use them to determine the fairness of trades. The most popular version is the one created by former Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson, which has been in use since the 1990s. There's also another version of the chart, which originated at Pro-Football-Reference, and which uses the historical average Approximate Value (AV) accumulated by players selected in each draft slot to determine the value of each pick. (You can click right here for a side-by-side comparison of the two charts.)
Rather than use these charts to evaluate trades, we're going to use them today to determine how teams spent their draft capital this year. What does that mean?
For example, the top two picks in the draft were both quarterbacks. On the Jimmy Johnson chart, that works out to 5,600 points worth of value spent on QBs. The first pick is worth 3,000 points and the second pick is worth 2,600 points. Add that up, and you get 5,600 points. But there were also 13 more picks used on quarterbacks in the top-224, totaling 1,609.1 more points in draft value, per the Jimmy Johnson chart. How does that compare to other positions? Let's check out the breakdown. You can find the Jimmy Johnson chart values in the far right column and the AV-based chart values in the middle column.
As you can see, NFL teams spent more Jimmy Johnson chart draft capital on cornerbacks (8,998.6 points) than at any other position within the first 224 picks of the draft. Corners were followed by interior defensive linemen (4-3 tackles and all 3-4 linemen; 8,269.2 points), edge defenders (4-3 defensive ends and 3-4 outside linebackers; 8,063.5 points), quarterbacks, and offensive tackles (OT; 6,992.9 points).
On the AV-based chart, though, the order is a bit jumbled. Cornerbacks still top the list (208.0), followed by IDL (202.0), and EDGE (173.4), but wide receivers jump up to fourth (149.0), followed by tackles (148.2).
(Note: "OTHER" is the total draft capital spent on fullbacks, kickers, punters, and long-snappers)
The order gets even more jumbled when you break those point values down into an average per selection. There were 30 cornerbacks drafted, but only 15 QBs. It's no wonder more capital was spent on the former than the latter. Here's a look at the by-position rankings of average per-pick draft capital spent, per each chart.
| DRAFT CAPITAL SPENT IN 2016 – AVERAGE PER SELECTION | ||
| RANK | AV CHART | JJ CHART |
| 1 | IDL (8.1) | QB (480.6) |
| 2 | QB (7.9) | OT (349.6) |
| 3 | OT (7.4) | EDGE (336.0) |
| 4 | EDGE (7.2) | IDL (330.8) |
| 5 | C (7.2) | CB (300.0) |
| 6 | CB (7.0) | C (274.9) |
| 7 | LB (6.5) | LB (238.7) |
| 8 | S (5.6) | S (209.6) |
| 9 | WR (5.5) | WR (207.0) |
| 10 | RB (4.9) | RB (184.9) |
| 11 | TE (4.6) | TE (139.4) |
| 12 | G (4.1) | G (121.7) |
| 13 | OTHER (2.4) | OTHER (63.8) |
Despite NFL teams having devoted more total draft capital to cornerbacks than players at any other position (on both charts), the average cornerback selection ranked only sixth on the AV-based chart and fifth on the Jimmy Johnson chart.
The average values reveal just how much more highly the Jimmy Johnson chart values the top picks in the draft than the AV-based chart does. Quarterbacks don't just leapfrog interior defensive lineman, they do so by over 130 points. If the two charts valued each draft slot equally, you'd expect an average of 341.0 points to have been spent on QBs on the Johnson start. Instead, that number was 480.6 points. And it wasn't just quarterbacks leaping over interior defensive linemen, but also offensive tackles (four of the top-16 picks) and edge defenders.
