Rookie ranks, plus a couple mailbag Qs

Answering two good recent subscriber questions

It’s always been my M.O. to not want to do the type of content everyone is doing, but I do realize some of you are in dynasty leagues with rookie drafts right now and it would probably be helpful if I updated my pre-draft rookie ranks, which are clearly outdated. So I’m going to throw a few thoughts on that at the bottom of this post, because while my opinion is not the opinion you should value most, not updating my pre-draft stuff would be criminal based on how far off it was.

First, though, a couple great recent questions from subscribers that I wanted to boost to everyone. The first was a comment on and relates to a lot of what I wrote about in my pre-draft look at prospect evaluation.

From Cameron:

You reminded me of a question I've harbored for a few years now. I've seen enough comments and stories about how there are some NFL teams that everyone outside the organization seems to know are pretty terrible at prioritizing the right traits in skill position draft picks (or perhaps certain skill positions). Like the Patriots with WRs. Point being, listen to enough scouts for enough time and you know certain teams are years behind the best in teams in terms of college talent evaluation. But I've never seen anyone attempt to compile a list of which these teams are. It would be very useful, theoretically, because one might want to discount draft capital when its spent by those franchises.

Your post reminded me of these thoughts when you mentioned comparing, post hoc, the draft capital of Jalin Hyatt and Trey Palmer. You correctly note that the fastest WR in the draft usually gets a DC bump, but do the teams who do that (Patriots, formerly reliably the Eagles and the Raiders, etc.) deserve a devaluing of the prospects on which they spend that draft capital? If Hyatt goes in 2nd round to the Steelers or Cowboys and Palmer goes in the 3rd round to the Cardinals, Raiders or Titans, do we really think that gap in draft capital accurately reflects the league's assessment of their skills?

This is a really interesting discussion as it relates to Hyatt and Palmer and the team examples Cameron gave at the end there, and I do think with a lot of stuff there’s probably something to it at the extremes. At the same time, if we know prospect evaluation to be a total crapshoot, we would expect a normal distribution of prospect success to lead to some of these things that look like trends. What I mean by that is if everyone were flipping coins for every prospect in terms of whether they were successful or not, the sample is large enough — especially when we split out each team’s track record by each position — that we’d expect somewhere within the sample we’d get results like “Steelers WRs” flipping heads and “Patriots WRs” flipping tails six times in a row each (or something like seven out of eight or whatever).

I’m not saying that’s the explanation here. I do believe there are teams that have real skills or deficiencies in certain areas. (Although I do think N’Keal Harry for example was a good prospect who looks a lot like other good prospects who succeeded, and I think efforts to paint him as not being one are almost entirely done in hindsight. So I don’t think the Patriots are just looking in all the wrong places necessarily, either.)

There’s also the reality that teams could get better or worse at these things over time. Decision-makers like GMs change, scouts get promoted or hired away (it might be the case that a specific scout was the key to a specific positional evaluation), and teams that are failing in one area might overhaul their approach. If a team has traditionally trusted its film-grinders to make WR decisions and not found success, they might suddenly shift heavily toward analytical profiles one year.

All of which is just to say that while I think Cameron’s question is strong and is the kind of thing that’s absolutely worth considering, I also always want to caution those who I’ve noticed over the years have a tendency to latch onto one piece of the evaluation process too firmly. There’s probably a lot of randomness it what we think we’ve observed.

From Bobby:

Hey Ben, curious where are good resources to find advanced and rate metrics for football. I.e., what is the baseball savant or fangraphs equivalent for football metrics.

For those of you who don’t know the references, Baseball Savant and Fangraphs are awesome resources for scouring baseball data, and it’s really pretty awesome what fans of that sport have at their fingertips. I don’t know many other sports deeply enough to comment, but it does seem to me that football is way, way behind in this regard.

One of the big issues and frustrations with NFL data analysis is how so little is open source and easily accessible. I use Pro-Football-Reference for a lot of base stuff, and you can get good and accurate full-season data there. But it’s pretty ridiculous that in the year 2023, the NFL still doesn’t just release routes data. They track it with their GPS system! They even make it accessible on their Next Gen Stats box score pages in real time during games, but then they remove those once the game is over and as far as I know, it’s not compiled anywhere.

For routes data, which is a massive centerpiece of so much WR and TE analysis, I use a PFF subscription. But there is also an issue where routes data isn’t consistent across providers, and Sports Info Solutions for example — which RotoViz uses for their apps — tracks routes with different parameters, which leads to fewer routes overall and dramatically alters the calculation for stats like Yards Per Route Run (YPRR) or Targets Per Route Run (TPRR). And that’s a major problem because using PFF stats, anything over 2.0 YPRR for example is elite, but for SIS data that’s not necessarily true, and it’s probably something closer to 2.5. The whole scale shifts.

Anyway, this is one of the fundamental issues of football data, where something like baseball data is far more objective because we’re talking about isolated instances. It’s interesting in baseball that the defensive metrics are much more similar to the issues I’m describing in football, where the need to account for fielder positioning, route to the ball, the velocity and trajectory of the ball, and then trying to figure out how to quantify that in terms of something like “outs generated above replacement” or some of the stats that bucket out plays and call them something like “20%-40% likely to be made” plays and each player has a percentage of plays that fall into that bucket that they’ve made — those are all attempts to solve a more complex problem than most baseball stats offer, because those defensive metrics include so much more variability on all the inputs for each result.

Anyway, I always love these questions about football data, and I’m clearly off on a tangent here, but I’ll never pass up the opportunity to wax poetic about it. What I would recommend is going to PFR, PFF (which is expensive but still reasonably affordable for a random person, while something like SIS is mostly too pricy for random subscribers and is more for organizations, as I understand it), and then also if you know how to use R, you can go to NFLfastR, which is a package that will allow you to scrape play-by-play data that you can then structure yourself.

But in terms of the initial question about what the Fangraphs or Baseball Savant of the NFL is, my answer is it somehow doesn’t exist. It should be Next Gen Stats over at nfl.com, probably, but what they make available is still so limited, years into that project. PFF makes more stuff available, but they still wall off a ton of great stuff that is only available for the teams that subscribe, as well as their content producers.

Of course then you run into issues — and I’m not focused solely on PFF here, but rather across the industry — where data access is a massive driver of who can even do good work. Unfortunately, then some of those individuals treat their access as a special skill, like they are developing some groundbreaking way of thinking simply because they are asking obvious questions with their expanded resources. Fortunately, we do sometimes get the right type of analysts in the right places where the fit of data access and ability to make the most of that data actually makes sense, and some really cool stuff is generated (we’ve seen some great work from PFF as a result of this over the past several years, but then some of those people have since moved on).

Anyway, I understand where Bobby’s question comes from here, and it’s always a point of contention for me. You see people Tweeting or otherwise sharing stats that seem novel and interesting, but the way they are breaking them down — or the parts they are sharing — don’t explain why you should care about that stat, or are clearly cherry picking or using arbitrary endpoints or what have you. And then you just want to look at the whole database and ground yourself and see what is “good” in that stat and whether the leaderboard actually makes sense, or if it’s a stat that maybe tells a confusing story, but the unfortunate reality is access to that stuff is just not nearly as open source as it should be, and there are all sorts of barriers, even for connected people who have been in the industry for a long time like myself.

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Rookie draft ranks

Alright, let’s get into some prospect talk. As I wrote in the above-linked piece, draft capital and landing spots were going to play a huge role in how we viewed this class. A lot of the players didn’t move around a lot compared to my pre-draft ranks, because they went about where we expected, and the landing spots were fine. But then there were also a bunch who were impacted by unexpected things happening, or even vaguely expected things, but then they went better than I accounted for (read: Anthony Richardson).

So anyway, here are some quick SuperFlex/TE Premium ranks with notes on spots where I think I may differ from consensus and it might be worth explaining my thinking. A lot of it builds off a quick rookie mock Shawn Siegele and I did during our Day 2 draft stream. I’m also going to work off the pre-draft ranks so you’ll see more explanation for players who moved (and for those who didn’t, you will likely find pre-draft explanation in the other post to be mostly unchanged).

After that, I’ll hit on two good subscriber questions from the posts last week that I wanted to answer for everyone.

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Tier 1

1. Bijan Robinson
2. Anthony Richardson
3. Jahmyr Gibbs
4. Bryce Young
5. Jaxon Smith-Njigba
6. CJ Stroud

I moved Richardson way up after landing both in the top five and also in a spot I really like for his immediate rushing production, because I think he and Jonathan Taylor should play off each other very well in the rushing attack. I probably should have been more open to this possibility when I had him in my pre-draft second tier, but I was a bit too influenced by seeing him fall as low as the twenties in some mocks.

I have seen concerns about landing spot for Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Jahmyr Gibbs, but I would describe myself as being very unconcerned. JSN’s draft capital came in a bit lighter than anticipated, and Gibbs went higher obviously at 12 overall, and I do think both of those things were notable. But I would consider these ranks extremely tight from No. 2 through No. 5, and I have no issue with people adjusting those ranks. CJ Stroud is the pretty clear No. 6 but also moves into the top tier given the draft capital.

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Tier 2

7. Jordan Addison
8. Quentin Johnston

I’m not really trying to knock Jordan Addison down as much as I thought it made sense to elevate the other names I have rising (in the pre-draft stuff I had Addison in a tier with Richardson and Stroud and with Quentin Johnston a tier behind). I love Addison’s landing spot and while I have the 1.07 and/or 1.08 in a couple leagues and thus went into the draft hoping something like a top-five Will Levis landing spot might push someone like JSN or Gibbs from the above tier down to 1.07, I still found myself leaving the draft more excited about the possibilities at 1.07 and 1.08 than I was going in.

In other words, I am pretty stoked about Addison to the Vikings, and also Johnston to the Chargers, which both feel like slam dunks for early route share where they can thrive if they hit the higher-end possibilities their profiles suggest, and should still be production even if they are something close to their medians (or are slight disappointments). With both of them, I see very limited concern about there being two established pass-catchers on the rosters they join, and I similarly think the two-WR set data that has been referenced for JSN’s landing spot is silly. These guys got legit draft capital and their success or failure will not be determined by a few percentage points of projected route share. They will almost certainly all be running routes on over 50% of dropbacks fairly quickly, and if successful, there is only a small shift in what their overall production might look like due to stuff like team alignment (which can obviously also progress, and I would expect for a team like the Seahawks, that the selection of JSN would indicate some potential shift, especially given offensive coordinator Shane Waldron’s background with the 11-personnel-heavy Rams).

Anyway, that’s all a little too focused of a discussion for what I wanted to get into here, but I did want to get that take off. That’s a great example of the kind of mistake that has often been made where people get too focused on landing spot and what the old tendencies of a team are, rather than considering what a first-round pick of a given player might mean for how they view things going forward. There are no guarantees, but we’re always dealing with uncertainties, and too much weight gets put onto that type of stuff as people try to find something to cling to. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed is king” is the idea, except in this case that person is a false prophet whose one eye is glass and following them just ensures you’re moving with a crowd, which in the case of fantasy football, is a bad thing.

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Tier 3a

9. Zay Flowers
10. Dalton Kincaid
11. Michael Mayer
12. Sam LaPorta
13. Will Levis
14. Marvin Mims

The things I wrote pre-draft about landing spot and draft capital and the shuffling of the rankings I expected — all that implied that the arrangement of the group I had listed as Tier 4 in the last writeup might be difficult, and it has proven to be. So I’m going with the 3a and 3b tiering system as we reach this area.

These are the profiles from the rest of the group I like the most, but I wouldn’t argue if you had guys from Tier 3b as high as 9. As far as my opinion, the tight ends in particular I think are a neck above the rest of the profiles in consideration for this group, and then Zay Flowers obviously fits here (he should arguably be with the WRs a tier higher, but the Baltimore landing spot only made it easier for me to lean into some concerns I’ve written about and I’ll be largely fading or trading out when he looks like the right pick).

Beyond those, Will Levis looks like he has a real path to start, and Tennessee trading up early on Day 2 to stop his slide — and not even moving up that far but still doing so to ensure they got him — is a positive sign for how they view him. So even as I’m not high on him, QB value in SuperFlex leagues dictates he has to go off the board somewhere in this range (I could see letting him fall to the middle of the second round, as well). And then Marvin Mims got Round 2 draft capital and was already a fun prospect, so he’s a guy I want to be high on.

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Tier 3b

15. Jayden Reed
16. Rashee Rice
17. Zach Charbonnet
18. Devon Achane
19. Jonathan Mingo
20. Kendre Miller
21. Luke Musgrave
22. Jalin Hyatt
23. Josh Downs
24. Tank Bigsby
25. Tyjae Spears
26. Cedric Tillman
27. Chase Brown
28. Roschon Johnson

I mean, pick your poison. The big storyline here is draft capital matters, and several of these guys land here because I’m focused on them being taken on Day 2. Additionally, as I wrote at length about pre-draft, because there were relatively few can’t-miss profiles this year, landing spots and the offenses these players slide into matter quite a bit.

But to be clear, I don’t feel great about how I’ve arranged any of this, and it’s more about the tiering and general discussion for those of you who don’t have access to other resources. This is totally the kind of thing where I’ll look back on it during the season and feel like an absolute idiot for having certain guys ahead of others, so this is the part where I tell my future self — as well as all of you — that I haven’t even watched tape on all these guys, because I don’t pretend to be a prospect guru, and I’m mostly firing these off for those who might need something for a rookie draft. Not letting great be the enemy of good and all that.

From here on out, you’re drafting for need a little bit — Hendon Hooker would be an option if you’re thin at QB, there are other TEs to consider, and there are plenty of flyers at both RB and WR, with RB typically being the default stabs because of how they can gain in value — and I think you’re giving a ton of consideration to capital and landing spot. As far as late-rounders, I like Evan Hull, I’m still vaguely intrigued by Trey Palmer, I haven’t given up hope Darnell Washington develops into something (but he now seems like a multiyear project with medical concerns), but you can also make a case to be grabbing the Round 3 WRs I didn’t list above pretty quickly after this point in your rookie drafts, like Michael Wilson and Tank Dell (whose size at 165 pounds is a pretty big issue for me).

The next big project you’ll start to see content from me about is projections, as I’m getting started early this year, with a hope to have them completed by the end of June, and have my first redraft/best ball rankings released much earlier this year. Until next time!