Disclaimer #1: This is not a “We should have drafted (good player) instead of (bad player)” post. This is not a post about player evaluation. It’s simply a breakdown of draft capital allocation by positional group.
Disclaimer #2: This does not take into account trades; the 2nd round pick that we traded for Dee Ford in 2019 isn’t accounted for. This is only looking at draft picks used on players on draft night.
Disclaimer #3: When looking at player drafted via trade up/back, I counted the value of the pick used on that player, not the value of the picks given up; e.g. the value of the Trey Lance pick = 2021 #3 overall, not 2021 #12 + 2022 #29 + 2023 #29.
Disclaimer #4: Since not all draft picks are created equal, I am using this draft value chart to assign a value to each draft pick in order to quantify the relative draft value of each draft pick. The chart stops at pick #224 so I assigned every pick past #224 a value of 1 for the sake of simplicity.
Disclaimer #5: This process is not perfect. There is a lot of context that goes into draft day decisions that this analysis doesn’t take into account (roster status, free agency, upcoming contracts, draft day opportunity). However, just because a process isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it’s not valuable or insightful. Teams don’t make draft picks at random and 7 years of drafting is a lot of data. At the very least we should be able to see some high level insights of this team’s roster-building philosophy.
NFL draft is the window into a team’s roster building philosophy. Want to know what teams value most? Look at where they spend most of their draft capital. At its core, the NFL draft is the foundation of every team’s talent acquisition strategy.
After aggregating all the 49ers draft picks over the course of 7 year and assigning a relative draft value to those picks using the draft value chart linked above, here is the 49ers draft pick value allocation breakdown by position group:
| Position Group | Relative Draft Value | % of Total |
|---|---|---|
| Defensive Line | 6286 | 42.13 % |
| Quarterback | 2287 | 15.33 % |
| Wide Receiver | 2086 | 13.98 % |
| Offensive Line | 1903 | 12.75 % |
| Off-ball Linebacker | 878 | 5.88 % |
| Secondary | 790 | 5.30 % |
| Running Back | 343 | 2.30 % |
| Special Teams | 178 | 1.19 % |
| Tight End | 166 | 1.11 % |
High level takeaways:
- It’s blatantly obvious that this team highly prioritizes the defensive line. Nearly half of all our draft capital over the course of 7 years has been spent on the defensive line. If I did this analysis for the other 31 teams, would bet 42.13% would lead the league. Given how much we’ve spent on D-line compared to how many of those players are significant contributors to this team right now, you could make the argument that we’re actually not that good at drafting D-line, but that’s a conversation for another time.
- The discrepancy between draft capital spent on O-line vs D-line is alarming. 12% vs 42%. We spent more draft capital on Trey Lance (2200) than we have spent on O-line (1903) over 7 years. We’ve never drafted a center. In my opinion, we should be spending more on O-line.
- We’ve spent more draft capital on linebacker than we have on the secondary. We spent a 1st round pick on Reuben Foster, but we’ve never spent more than a 3rd round pick on a DB.
- We’ve spent more draft capital on special teams than we have on tight end. This one fucking kills me.
Feel free to shout out what you think is or is not insightful here.
data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15_6Fdcsor7yXF0soMBqsUNRUuPnMFepjCwS9QfIIF1Q/edit?usp=sharing