Draft Day

Day 1 of the draft is held in prime time on Thursday night for television coverage. American network ESPN have covered the draft for the longest time and NFL Network are also now established in their coverage of the draft. Fox covered for the first time this year but shared their on-screen talent with NFL Network and broadcast this feed rather than their own coverage. The first round is watched by millions and draft parties at Team stadiums and homes around the US are now everywhere. NFL Network is the coverage that is screened internationally. You can also follow the event in NFL Network but the coverage is provided by NFL Network’s second tier of analysts. For the full experience you have to watch the main feed.

Invited Prospects

The NFL now invites many prospects to the draft usually around thirty. This has been evolving year-on-year and now includes a full experience for those high profile prospects chosen to attend. They have a day of events in the host city followed by a red-carpet experience once they get to the draft with interviews and much fanfare. Once they are inside they are allowed into a green room which does contain cameras but television networks will not show prospects on the phone to teams before a pick is announced as they like to preserve the drama for the pick announcement. This process has resulted in some embarrassingly long stays in the green room for players everyone thought would be drafted early. In years gone by the NFL would invite only a handful of players and only those expected to go in the top ten. The most famous green room stay was by Aaron Rodgers who lasted well into the night until Green Bay picked him up. Also a comforting story for players who go through that unexpectedly now given the career Rodgers has carved out for himself. The advantage to a slide, as with Rodgers, is that you slide down the draft and are picked later by a more successful team who have the conditions that will enable your success in the future. Nowadays with the NFL inviting many more prospects some will not be picked until round 2 and they often only attend the first night of the draft knowing they won’t get picked but still go for the experience. Many top prospects also now choose to stay at home and celebrate with more family and friends but they will miss out on the walk to the stage, the obligatory bear-hug with the commissioner and holding up the shirt of their new team in front of the cameras and the crowd.

Making selections

The Commissioner opens the draft and the first team is put on the clock (order explained earlier in this guide). In the first round teams have ten minutes to make a selection, in the second round this reduces to 7 minutes and then reduces again to 5 minutes for the rest of the draft. If a team doesn’t make a selection in this time they pass over their pick to the next team and the next team can submit their selection as soon as the ten minutes for the previous team has fully elapsed. They could in theory select the player that the team who let the clock run out was intending to draft and be awarded that player if they beat the other team to the selection. In theory this can continue for multiple teams until the original team makes a selection. This happens very rarely, the last time being 2011 when the Chicago Bears reportedly reneged on a trade they were discussing with the Baltimore Ravens (more on trades later) and so the Ravens waited to submit their pick believing that they had traded the pick away, the next team was able to make a pick before the Ravens realised the situation and made their pick anyway. Its only in these extreme circumstances that this usually happens.

Team decision makers are not in attendance at the draft, they are holed up in war rooms at their facilities where their rankings will appear on the walls and where they can have ready access to their scouts and coaches to discuss selections before they are made. When they have decided to make a pick they first get the prospect they want to draft on the phone. This is largely superstition but there is the unlikely scenario that a prospect may have been involved in a car crash or some other terrible accident that would stop a team from drafting them. Once they reach them on the phone, they then phone the two team representatives who are present at the draft sitting at tables close to where the selections are announced. The NFL also has league officials there to co-ordinate the picks. The team representatives write down the player selected on a card and physically hand it to the league officials, until that has been done the pick has not been made. This is then communicated immediately to the next team picking and they are informed that they are on the clock and that they are unable to pick the player that the team before has just picked. That team can then eliminate that player from the discussion of who to select and pick from their new updated rankings. The pick is then announced – in the first round by the Commissioner normally – from the podium. If the pick is there, he comes on stage and has pictures and an interview, we can sometimes see into a player’s living room if he didn’t attend the draft and did allow cameras into his home for the draft – usually reserved for the high-profile players. TV crews then analyse the pick while the next team is deciding who to pick.

I’m often asked, when explaining the draft, about players being obligated to play for the team that drafts them. The draft process means that when a player is selected, that team is entitled to that players playing time in the NFL exclusively or rather the right to negotiate a contract with them exclusively. The contract with that team is largely determined by the rookie pay scale to be explained later but this means the contract negotiation is not a process that shouldn’t reach a conclusion. Also with contracts for high picks being so lucrative it is unusual that a draft pick will refuse to sign a contract on the basis of not being paid enough money. If they didn’t sign a contract it would likely be because they don’t want to play for that team and if they didn’t sign a contract, that player would forgo his ability to play in the league for that season and would have to re-enter the draft a year later. He would again have to agree a contract with a new team that drafts him. In reality this never really happens and most draft picks, even the high picks, play for the team that selects them. There have been a handful of very high-profile players who have made clear before the draft their refusal to play for a certain team, this only happens when a player is a certainty to be the number one pick and is clearly the best prospect. Again, it is rare that this happens but in those instances a trade is normally consummated (see below for information on trades) to allow the player to play for a team he wants to play for. For examples of this, the draft stories of Eli Manning and John Elway will make for interesting reading.

Team Draft Philosophy

The picking of players and the philosophy that teams adopt is much debated and very different from team to team. At the beginning of the off season teams will identify at what positions they want to improve. All teams then put together a rankings list of players eligible for that year’s draft. The degree to which these positions of “need” then influence who they select in the draft varies from team to team. Some stick religiously to their rankings, regardless of if they have a superstar playing the position of the player that is at the top of their board when they select. These teams believe that the NFL can also stand for “not for long” and believe that teams are transient, that superstar could be close to retirement and their play may soon diminish. They may also not be able to re-sign that superstar to a large contract because they have used too much of their salary allocation and so may want a younger, cheaper alternative waiting in the wings eventually, if not to actually replace the superstar then for leverage in the contract negotiations. That player may also suffer a career-changing injury or there may be other positions that either the superstar or the newly drafted player could play. And they believe that in the scenario that the player they already have continues to be a superstar then the newly drafted player may have value down the line to the franchise as a trade commodity (more on that soon). Other teams at the other end of the spectrum will target certain positions in the draft to fill the holes they need to fill, they believe in the obvious, that player acquisition should be targeted at where you need to improve. Many teams chart a middle course between the two approaches perhaps looking at a cluster of players being of the same value and then pick the player who’s positional value is greatest.

It is also worth saying here that teams will eliminate or devalue certain players in their rankings due to the fact that they don’t fit that team’s scheme of play well or because of off-the-field concerns/injury concerns that the team believe will affect the player deep into his career. Teams may also devalue certain positions, preferring to pick early from a position that is perceived to have more value to the team, these positions usually include Quarterback, Left Tackle, Pass-rusher and Cornerback. Positions that are often devalued early include Middle Linebacker, Running Back and Safety. This can be changeable though and often teams who don’t look at positional value in this way can take advantage of other teams over-rating players and taking them too early – often known as over-drafting. It’s also important to note that the best college players do not necessarily make the best NFL players. College Football is a proving ground but the way some teams play and the way some players play doesn’t translate to the NFL. The key to scouting is noticing the players that translate well to the next level – its easy to identify the best players in college but their skill-set may not work in the NFL. For example a Quarterback who is small and fast and uses his speed to beat teams by running instead of passing because of his skill-set and the way the team wants to play may not be successful in the NFL. I’ll have a future post that explains player evaluation in more detail but suffice to say here that there is a lot more to it than simply ranking the best players in College Football.

Trades

Trades are a huge part of the draft, teams are able to trade picks regularly, either for other picks, for players or both. The perceived value a team gets from a trade is normally a huge topic of debate. Normally player for pick trades happen throughout the year (except during the season after the trade deadline) and rarely on draft day. Most pick for pick trades happen while a team is on the clock. This is part of the drama of draft day as teams quickly negotiate and execute trades while they are on the clock i.e. in ten minutes in Round 1. Generally when teams are on the clock they have two options: select a player, or “trade back”. If they choose to trade back they have to find a willing partner who wants to “trade up” with them. Teams will often explore trading up for certain players that they may covet deeply. In early round 1 this is often for a Quarterback but can also be for other positions. To execute a trade up you have to offer the team looking to trade back enough value. Clearly just swapping picks would not be worthwhile for the team holding the higher pick so the team wishing to trade up would need to part with another pick or number of picks in order for the swap to be considered equitable. The number of picks and the value of those picks (i.e. what round) is determined by a number of factors, principal among these would be the distance between the picks teams are looking to swap. For instance a team wanting to trade up 20 places would need to give up more (either in number or value of picks) than a team wanting to trade up 5 places. However this needs to be cross-referenced with the value of the picks being swapped. Generally the stakes are higher the further up the draft these picks are. For instance someone wanting to move up 5 places in the top ten of the first round would have to give up considerably more than a team wanting move up 5 places in the third round.

Teams are also not limited to trading this year’s picks, they are able to trade next years picks and in high value trades, they often do. For instance the Washington Redskins gave up three years of number one picks and other picks to trade up from number 4 to number 2. Franchises are held accountable for these picks and while most are small fry where teams move up a few places in later rounds, every year big blockbuster trades are executed. The value a team gets from a trade is debated at length on draft day but inevitably the value of a trade can only become apparent when those picks turn into players and are either successful or not. The Redskins selection of Quarterback Robert Griffin III in the scenario I mentioned, was in the end seen as a failure after injuries and other factors de-railed his NFL career before it even started. In that example the Redskins mortgaged the future of their franchise by giving up the opportunity to draft several first round calibre players for the chance to draft their Quarterback of the future. Many teams horde (some more than others) draft picks because they think the draft being a lottery means having more tickets could mean more success so rarely trade up and often trade down to accumulate more picks. These competing ideologies of those who want to trade up for quality and those who want to trade back for quantity back trades ultimately possible and add to the excitement of the spectacle but realistically some middle way needs to be charted as the extreme of both approaches has proven to be ineffective.

There is a trade value chart which has been in operation for some time, innovated and changed/adapted over the years by leaders of franchises – this allows teams to judge the value of picks by a points score and therefore know which picks would be fair to offer to be able to trade up. However this wisdom changes over the years with changes to the league – for instance the advent of the rookie pay scale (mentioned later) meant that top picks were no longer paid huge sums of money relative to other picks, making those top picks more valuable to teams as they did not have to commit as much of the owner’s capital to one young man. A big reason for teams’ departure from the collective wisdom of the trade value chart is leverage. A team may take advantage of another team who is desperate for a Quarterback and knows they will over-pay to trade up and take him, teams wanting to trade back may initiate an auction between teams wanting to trade up for a specific popular player that they don’t value or a team may believe that they can get a similar ability of player by trading back and acquiring more picks, so if they then call a team first to ask them if they would like to move up they give leverage to the team moving up.

Days 2 and 3

So on day 1 all manner of fireworks can go off, the excitement dulls slightly as we move into night two which contains Rounds 2 and 3 but this is where teams can really get better. They can get two players, or more if more picks have been acquired by trading back, that while not good enough to have been picked in Round 1 are still good enough to be considered amongst the best 100 players from the previous season for translation to the NFL level. The picks are normally announced by legends of the teams drafting and picks move quicker as mentioned earlier in 7 minute and 5 minute limits for Rounds 2 and 3 respectively. However for the more ordered, systematic viewer watching on television can be a harrowing experience as picks are queued up and the real draft is flying along in the background while the announcements move much slower than the picks are being made.

If day 2 has less pomp and circumstance than day 1, then day 3 is even less prestigious but teams can find gems – the one you will hear most often cited will inevitably be Tom Brady, selected 199th overall in the sixth round. While watching on TV, picks will appear on a ticker at the bottom of the screen and are much less frequently announced and/or analysed by the analysts on screen. Day 3 is about the novelty of a monkey revealing the selection for a team or for the interesting story of a player who may not be good enough for Rounds 1, 2 or 3 but does have a backstory that engages the viewing public. Its not for the faint-hearted and can be heavy going – Round 1 lasts about 3-4 hours, Rounds 2 and 3 last about 4 hours but day 3 can last well over 6 hours. On the plus side it is at a more reasonable hour than the first two days. The final pick of the entire draft is affectionately referred to as Mr Irrelevant, this is because for many years the final pick of the draft was a cursed position where nobody managed to emerge as a contributor on an NFL team. It was then turned into a tradition where the last pick of the draft was given the moniker as a term of endearment and was given a parade where, amongst other things, they receive the Lowsman Trophy (a play on the fact that the best player in College Football receives the Heisman Trophy). In recent years Mr Irrelevants have gone on to contribute to teams so this is less of a curse than before. On day 2 and 3 teams will also bring in their draft picks from the previous day for introductory press conferences and to meet coaches and staff.

After the draft

Once the final selection is made, teams begin the process of signing undrafted free agents. Just over 250 players are drafted but that leaves an enormous pool of players still available. These players are now free to sign with any team as free agents. Teams build a draft board before the game that ranks the players they think are worth drafting. Most teams have plenty of players left on their board at the end of the draft and they then set about recruiting free agents from this pool. Team rosters swell to 90 players in advance of off-season workouts and many of those are made up of undrafted free agents as teams sign well into double figures of these players straight after the draft. With the ability to choose the best situation for you in terms of competition at your chosen position, many prospects prefer to be signed in undrafted free agency rather than be selected in the seventh round of the draft.

The players that were drafted also now begin to negotiate their rookie contract. Rookie contracts started to get out of hand some years ago so the league instituted a rookie pay-scale to ensure that unproven rookies weren’t paid obscene sums of money before they had played a professional snap especially next to established and proven veterans being paid less. This rookie pay scale sets contract lengths at 4 years, except with first round picks where the franchise are able to take up the option of a fifth year if the player proves himself. The amount they earn will also be determined by the position they are drafted and their position on the field relative to the average salary for that position in the NFL currently. They will also end up in rookie minicamps very soon where they train at the franchise’s facility with the other drafted and signed rookies.