Revisiting the 2012 NFL Draft

I'm continuing to post about the NFL draft because there is nothing else to post about and I find it fascinating to go back and see how teams did several years on. As I mentioned previously, giving draft grades before the players have even stepped inside an NFL facility is silly. One of the most obvious examples of this is the 2012 draft class of the Seattle Seahawks, which was nearly universally panned, coming in 30th on Pro Football Outsiders' report card that summarizes the grades from 9 NFL writers. Bleacher Report gave the Seahawks the worst grade of D, calling first-rounder Bruce Irvin a reach (and saying 3rd-round pick Russell Wilson was "messed up" as they club had signed Matt Flynn in the offseason). Two years later, the Seahawks were Super Bowl champs.

Hindsight is 20/20 of course, and I am not trying to criticize these publications; I do understand the appeal of these articles as fans want to understand how their team did. The point is that they are silly and fans get little meaningful insight. Some writers do go back and re-grade their picks after a few seasons, but now that I have discovered Pro Football Reference's Approximate Value metric, we can go one better and give a precise ranking. The 2012 NFL draft ranking is below:

Team   Picks   Avg tCAV   Grade
SEA      10     40.20      30
CAR       7     26.86      13
NE        7     26.71       5
DEN       7     26.14      29
TB        7     26.00       6
HOU       8     25.38      21
PHI       9     24.78       4
MIA       9     24.22      18
CIN      10     22.30       1
WAS       9     22.11      15
IND      10     21.30       3
STL      10     20.50      14
BUF       9     20.33      17
MIN      10     18.80      11
ARI       7     18.57      16
CLE      11     17.18      19
PIT       9     16.22       2
SD        7     16.00       9
JAX       6     15.33      27
TEN       7     15.29      24
NO        5     14.80      32
GB        8     14.75       7
DET       8     14.75      20
KC        8     14.13      23
BAL       8     13.25      12
NYJ       8     12.88      28
CHI       6     12.83      22
DAL       7     11.86      10
OAK       6      9.33      31
NYG       7      6.43       8
ATL       6      5.83      25
SF        7      4.57      26

As you can see, Seattle has by far the best performance, mostly because of Wilson and second-round pick Bobby Wagner. They are the two best players taken in the draft, Irvin spent four seasons with the Seahawks before moving around the league, re-signing with Seattle a month ago, and his tCAV/G ranks 50th in this draft class, suggesting he was a reach after all.

The final column in the table above is the draft ranking as provided by Football Outsiders. Despite Seattle and Denver being completely underestimated, there is some correlation between the tCAV ranking and the draft ranking, with the coefficient being 0.27, suggesting weak correlation. So these guys do know something, just not as much as they think.

What is interesting here is that three of the top four teams in the ranking happened to be conference finalists a season later. Obviously, there is more to a successful team than a single draft, but with NFL careers so short, a good draft or two can propel you to the top quickly. New England took Dont'a Hightower and Chandler Jones and made their team even stronger. Denver's top three picks were Derek Wolfe, Danny Trevathan, and Malik Jackson who joined Von Miller, second overall pick from 2011, on the Bronco defense. Although they were embarrassed by Seattle in 2013, they became a defensive juggernaut that stifled Carolina in the 2015 Super Bowl and gave Peyton Manning his second ring. Brock Osweiler was also chosen by Denver that year; without him they would be second in the ranking.

On the other hand, the fourth conference finalist in 2013 was San Francisco, who had the worst 2012 draft. They were still enjoying the fruits of previous drafts, having lost to Baltimore in the 2012 Super Bowl. They upset Carolina in the Divisional Round, but the Panthers had Luke Kuechly and Josh Norman to go along with first overall pick Cam Newton in 2011 and eventually made it to the Super Bowl two years later.

Cincinnati was ranked number 1 with Dre Kirkpatrick and Kevin Zeitler their first-round picks; both have had solid careers but not enough to help the Bengals to any sort of glory. Of course, football is a game that changes very quickly, due to injuries and the fact that many positions become quite fungible as you move down the talent chart. In other words, there is a large drop off between the elite players at a position and the rest, who are mostly interchangeable. As you can see by looking back at the 2012 draft, finding just a couple of elite players can go a long way to a championship season.

Best,

Sean