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The original was posted on /r/nfl by /u/kitchensink108 on 2025-04-24 14:34:38+00:00.
I put together some charts showing which positions get drafted most, how much draft capital gets spent on each position, and some UDFA data.
Some initial info:
- Data is primarily from PFF. Whichever position they list a player at currently is the position used. Sometimes there are discrepancies between, like, if a player is listed as DI or DE, but hopefully looking at this much data helps minimize the effects of that.
- All data is from 2010-2024. This felt like a reasonable balance between having enough data to make it interesting, while keeping the data fairly relevant to current trends.
- Draft Capital uses an average of the percent value of each pick, from four charts (Rich Hill, Jimmy Johnson, Fitzgerald-Spielberger, Harvard).
- None of this looks at how good players are. It’s simply about who got drafted.
Chart 1: Capital Spent vs Players Drafted
The top right are positions that are drafted very often, and at a high cost. Lots of teams pouring capital into CB, WR, and EDGE. This tracks with what those players are getting paid nowadays.
Centers are weird, though. Not very many get drafted, and they’re pretty equally drafted across all rounds, including Round 1. But because you never get centers drafted in the Top 10, with Mike Pouncey at 15 overall being the highest, the position doesn’t get any significant boost here from its top prospects.
Chart 2: Median Draft Capital Spent
The are two things I found most interesting from this. One is that EDGE actually beats out QB. Second is just how equal everything is. There’s two big areas in the chart that most positions are grouped into, but the difference between these two groups is an median pick of ~116 versus a median pick of ~132, which isn’t wildly different.
I feel like maybe I should compare this chart against the Mean values, just to help show how front-weighted the draft trade charts are.
Chart 3: Players Drafted per Round
Your first question is probably, why only these positions? Because I wasn’t originally going to make this chart (right now at least), but I made this chart because centers looked so weird in previous charts and I was researching whether the data was correct. So I picked a handful of positions to make this chart to compare against.
QB, T, and EDGE are all premier positions, and all suffer a huge dropoff after Round 1. Center, meanwhile, ticks upward after Round 1. I’m quite certain it’s actually even more extreme than that – the centers that get picked in Round 1 are by-and-large very late round picks, whereas EDGEs can go 1OA.
Chart 4: UDFAs by Position
This is based on how many UDFAs played a snap their rookie season. If they got cut in camp, they’re not included. If they played 1 snap in garbage time week 1 and then got cut, they are included, even if it wasn’t on the first team that signed them.
My biggest takeaway here is that UDFA o-linemen are not very common. WR and CB are very common, though, which is interesting because they’re also drafted very often. I think part of this is how long these players last in the league. Teams roster a lot of both positions, and both positions have a lot of turnover, so teams are scrambling to fill in the gaps with whoever they can try out.
Chart 5: UDFA Ratios
Here’s the ratio of how many players get signed as UDFA versus getting drafted. No surprise to see ST so high. I also think it’s interesting how few quarterbacks get chosen. Like, even teams that are looking for 2nd or 3rd string QBs still want to spend draft capital on them instead of grabbing a UDFA.
Also, just how extreme the long snapper situation is, even compared to kickers and punters.
Conclusion
I’m not sure there’s really a clear conclusion here, I’ve just been analyzing a lot of data and having fun with it, so this is my newest post about some of that analysis.