Doug Drinen on NFL draft choices

Doug Drinen has a series of three posts on the Massey/Thaler NFL draft paper, looking at the theoretical consequences of the findings, and comparing them to what actually happened.

Worth reading the whole thing, but here's a quick summary:

-- if you try to predict the sum of a team's next three years' actual wins from the value of its draft choices this year, you get an r-squared of only about .07 (which is an r of about .26). So there is some predictive value, but not much.

-- there "traditional" draft choice values are not (statistically significantly) less predictive of future success than the Massey/Thaler values (which are different because they consider value for money, instead of just bulk value). Even if you ignore the lack of statistical significance, the difference is very small.

-- if you sum all the Massey/Thaler draft pick values for all 32 teams, they are all so close that they're virtually the same. The worst teams (first picks) do get a very slight benefit over the other teams, but it's pretty close to zero.

I previously reviewed the Massey/Thaler paper here.