The Basics

The very first thing to understand is that virtually all players selected through the Draft have played College Football. I will make explanations about College Football throughout this guide as you will need to know more about this but for here, suffice to say that the NFL has no feeder league. It used to have affiliated leagues like NFL Europe but these have come and gone and were usually for failed NFL players to get a second chance. College Football is the main proving ground for budding NFL players and playing in college at a high level is a crucial requisite to being a high pick. There have been international players selected or just general athletes selected over the years but they usually aren’t within the first 100 picks of the draft and usually don’t actually get drafted but fall into undrafted free agency which I will explain later. For this see other sport transfers such as Jarryd Hayne, Dwain Chambers and Lawrence Okoye as examples.

The Draft has seven rounds of selection, where each team has an opportunity to select a player from the talent pool once in each round, barring any trades, which I will explain later. The NFL Draft has gone through various iterations but the current format sees the seven rounds split across three days – to maximise television viewership.

First Round – Thursday Night – 8pm ET (1am BST)

Second and Third Rounds – Friday Night – 7pm ET (12 BST)

Fourth – Seventh Rounds – Saturday – 12 ET (5pm BST)

The Draft used to be in hotel ballrooms many moons ago and was, for the longest time, staged at Radio City Music Hall but is now a travelling festival that moves through different cities celebrating different parts of America as it goes. One year in Philadelphia with drafted players ascending the steps that Rocky made famous to another year being paraded in Roosevelt University’s Auditorium Theatre in Chicago with fans able to enjoy a huge festival in Grant Park.

The Draft order is set by the win-loss record from the previous season.

·       Of the teams that missed the playoffs the team that had the worst record selects first in every round and the team with the best record selects 20th

·       The playoff teams select from 21-32 based on when they are eliminated from the playoffs and their regular season win-loss record. So the team eliminated in the Wildcard round of the playoffs with the worst record will pick 21st, while the team eliminated in the Wildcard round of the playoffs with the best regular season win-loss record will pick 24th. The team that won the Superbowl picks 32nd.

·       If a team’s record is equal with another team’s record, the team with the higher strength of schedule (calculated by adding up their opponents’ combined number of wins) will draft higher. However this will then be reversed in later rounds e.g. if Team A and Team B have the same win-loss record but Team A has the higher strength of schedule then Team A will draft ahead of Team B in the first round but Team B will draft ahead of Team A in the second round. Then Team A will draft ahead in the third followed by Team B in the fourth. This process is the same for ties in record between multiple teams.

·       If a team’s strength of schedule is also equal then a coin toss will determine who selects ahead of the other in the first round followed by the same process as above for future rounds.

·       If a team loses a player in free agency they may eligible for what is known as a compensatory draft selection the year after this happens i.e. a player lost in 2018 free agency would potentially net a compensatory selection in the 2019 draft. To be eligible the player needs to be sufficiently valuable (worked out by the player’s salary at their new team combined with the amount of time they play in games the following season) and not have been released by their team. However if the team losing the player to free agency signs a player of similar value in free agency then they do not get a compensatory selection. So the compensatory selections are about compensating teams for net losses in free agency. The complicated formula mentioned earlier for working out if the loss of a player is eligible for this process is also what is used to calculate what round the compensatory selection will be in. Compensatory selections can be as high as the third round and continue until the seventh round. They are always at the end of each round. (You can read lots more explanations of the compensatory selection process in more detail on other draft websites.)

Players eligible for the Draft

To be eligible to “come out” (this is the phrasing that is most often used for players becoming eligible for the Draft you need to have been in University (College) for three years or more. Normally players enter the Draft when they graduate as Seniors in college.

College Football Explanation

When players commit to their College they have 4 years of playing eligibility – they are able to play College Football for a maximum of 4 years.

1st Year = Freshman (FR)

2nd Year = Sophomore (SO)

3rd Year = Junior (JR)

4th Year = Senior (SR)

Sometimes because of a year-long injury or because a young player needs longer to develop Colleges are able to give players what is known as a “Redshirt” year, where they are allowed to practice, be coached and develop as a player in college, attending their classes as normal but don’t play College Football on Saturdays. This allows them an extra year of eligibility at the end of their college career. It is usually denoted by the abbreviation RS before the codes mentioned above. Someone who is playing their second year of College Football but who underwent a Redshirt year when they first arrived on campus will be referred to as a Redshirt Sophomore.

However if they are good enough, players are able to “come out early ” for the draft. The restriction here is that they have to have been in College for three years so at least either a Junior or a Redshirt Sophomore – they will often be referred to as underclassmen. They are able to ask a committee of veteran talent evaluators put together by the NFL called the NFL Advisory Committee and they will give the player thinking about coming out early, an estimation of the round they think they will go in the Draft so that they can make a decision about whether they want to go back to College and perform better so that they are selected higher.

College Football Explanation

College Football does not promote equilibrium between teams as the NFL does and there are divisions, though there is no formal promotion and relegation between divisions. The FBS as it is more formally referred to, short for Football Bowl Subdivision and colloquially referred to as Division 1 is the highest level. It contains all of the storied College Football programmes and is where the majority of players are drafted from. There is a hierarchy within this division, however, as there are conferences within it considered more prestigious and tougher than others.

The Power 5 conferences – SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, ACC – cover most of the country and contain the biggest College Football programmes, the National Champion of College Football always comes from these conferences. Switching between conferences is rare and done in behind-the-scenes wrangling rather than through superior play on the field – although that can help a team wanting to move up the hierarchy of conferences.

SEC - widely considered to be the toughest conference in football and normally produces the most drafted players and most high choices. Short for the South-Eastern Conference it contains teams in the general area of the South-East of the country including Alabama, Louisiana State (LSU), and Florida for example. The Defensive lines in the SEC are notably strong.

Big Ten – a storied conference including some of the most dominant teams in the history of college football like Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State but less relevant when compared to the SEC. They do have a tradition of great Offensive Line play.

ACC – or the Atlantic Coast Conference, usually finds relevance through perennial challenger Florida State and other temporarily great teams such as Miami in the past and more recently Clemson.

Pac-12 – is the main conference on the pacific coast but there are teams further inland that have joined. Stanford and USC are the power-houses from this conference and it has arguably been the main challenger to the SEC in recent years along with the ACC but has become less relevant recently.

Big 12 – mostly in the South – teams such as Texas and Oklahoma, the Big 12 is a pass-happy league and it can be difficult to project offensive prospects to the league from the Big 12 due to the inflated statistics they can put up.

The other conferences - the Mountain West, AAC, MAC, Conference-USA and the Sun Belt conferences - contain all other teams (apart from the Independent schools mentioned in a second) taking the tally of FBS or Division 1 schools to 129.

Most conferences contain between ten and fourteen schools (ignore the numbers in the names of the Power 5 conferences, they used to mean something and now don’t – the Big Ten for instance has 14 colleges in it). They play a schedule within their conference usually around 9 games and a schedule out of conference – usually around 3 games. There is no pattern to their non-conference schedule as in the NFL and it is arranged between the colleges themselves. There are also a handful of independent schools, the biggest of which being Notre Dame, who operate outside of a conference and make up their games by being a regular part of many teams’ non-conference schedule. Conferences are old, and traditional but as with any other sport, money talks, so conferences and membership of them is usually about TV revenue.

The FCS, short for the Football Conference Subdivision, which has several layers is more commonly referred to as Division 2 or Division 3, is where so-called “small school” prospects come from.