Summary

Using data from the 2011 NFL season onwards, I look into the two drafting philosophies that seem to be most pervasive in the community of Best Player Available and Drafting for Positional Weakness. I compare the amount of a team’s draft that goes into either style of drafting against record based metrics. The results indicate that teams that use more picks on positions of weakness are positively associated with an improved record the following season. This association is even stronger for teams that use more high value picks on positions of weakness. Associations for Best Player Available approaches yielded values that were not statistically significant against zero. I then present a brief discussion about the results and potential future work.

The PDF includes code and a more thorough write up. In the spirit of reproducible research, I have added a tab in the menu of this website containing a link to all of the data I used. If it is of interest, I can eventually upload my scraper code though it is much less fun to view and significantly messier.