Which Colleges Produce the Best NFL Players

I am continuing my analysis of the NFL drafts, downloading every draft since 2000 (the one with Tom Brady), which comprises a total of 5,095 players. Those players went to a total of 309 institutions, including a few in Canada and overseas. So which school gets bragging rights for having the best NFL players? The answer will surprise you.

As in the previous post, I use Pro Football Reference's Approximate Value calculation to determine the overall success of an NFL player. PFR's founder Doug Drinen created a very complicated formula that assigns a number to each player season and called it Approximate Value (AV). Career Approximate Value (CAV) is the sum of a player's season AVs. But the number that is reported with the draft results and thus is the number I'm using is the Weighted Career Approximate Value, which takes 100% of the player's best AV season, 95% of his second-best, and so on. This is done to give more weight to a player's better seasons. I still use the acronym CAV for the weighted number because that is what PFR does. If you want the details, start here.

One caveat: the school listed is the school from where the player is drafted. No accounting is made if the player transferred. So Wisconsin gets credit for Russell Wilson's NFL success as he played his final year of college there, having transferred from North Carolina State, where he played three seasons.

To get started, I looked at the total number of draft picks for each school between 2000 and 2019. No surprise to see all power conference schools in the top 10:

Ohio St.     131
Alabama      118
Miami (FL)   115
LSU          112
Florida      110
USC          110
Florida St.  108
Georgia      108
Oklahoma      97
Notre Dame    85

But I wanted to see which schools had the best players in the NFL. I summed the CAV for each school and divided this total by the number of total draft picks for schools that had at least 20 picks, an average of one per year, to get that school's Draft Score. The results were not what I expected:

School        Picks     CAV   Draft Score
Purdue          43     1073      24.95
Texas           68     1576      23.18
California      63     1383      21.95
Miami (FL)     115     2383      20.72
Boston Col.     42      869      20.69
Mississippi     48      962      20.04
Tennessee       80     1538      19.23
Michigan        83     1589      19.14
Central Florida 29      511      17.62
Georgia Tech    37      645      17.43

Purdue has seen a number of excellent players graduate to the pros, most notably Drew Brees, who is second in CAV among active players behind Brady. But Purdue has also sent Matt Light, Shaun Phillips, Nick Hardwick, Rob Ninkovich, Cliff Avril, and Ryan Kerrigan, among many other solid players. You might notice something here, though. All of these players were drafted early in the century, with Kerrigan the latest, having been picked in 2011. In fact, since then, the Boilermakers have only had 9 players drafted, with Kawann Short (2nd round, 2013) the only one picked before the 5th round. The program is in decline.

Clearly, this analysis is biased against recent picks, whose career AV is still low, yet they are treated as if they are retired. Schools with several of these more recent picks will be dragged down in the rankings. To overcome this, I decided to compute Career Approximate Value per Game (CAV/G) and the results were substantially different.

School          Picks    CAV     Games   CAV/G
Boston College    42     869      2285   0.380
Alabama          118    1898      5673   0.335
Michigan          83    1589      4824   0.329
Mississippi       48     962      2934   0.328
USC              110    1917      5883   0.326
Purdue            43    1073      3293   0.326
Wisconsin         81    1334      4095   0.326
California        63    1383      4250   0.325
Georgia          108    1876      5777   0.325
Oklahoma St.      33     549      1707   0.322
Texas             68    1576      4937   0.319
Utah              53     908      2873   0.316
Miami (FL)       115    2383      7555   0.315
Oklahoma          97    1338      4267   0.314
Pittsburgh        49     825      2652   0.311

Another surprise. I don't think anybody considers Boston College a football factory. The Eagles have seen Matt Ryan and Luke Kuechly become stars, but also Chris Snee and Anthony Castonzo went here. Recent picks Justin Simmons and Matt Milano were also Eagles and their careers are off to a good start. As an aside, Boston College was also the home of one of just three players to finish with a negative CAV, namely Nate Freese, who went 3/7 in field goals for Detroit in 2014 and was cut after just three games. The other two are Ryan Lindley and Owen Pochman.

Schools with fewer picks will generally do better in these rankings. The more picks from a school, the more likely some of them will be in the lower rounds, and thus have lower CAVs. So to see Alabama second in the CAV/G ranking with 118 picks (nearly 6 per year) shows that they are a true football factory. I'm guessing the Dolphins are excited to have Tua Tagovailoa on board.

To demonstrate how having fewer picks will help your rankings, the school with the highest CAV/G is West Alabama, where Tyreek Hill went. His CAV is an impressive 47 in just 59 games (0.797 CAV/G) and no other player has been drafted from there. But NFL scouts will not suddenly start flocking to Livingston, I presume.

Finally, don't take these rankings too seriously. The key word in CAV is approximate, and I am just having a bit of fun playing around with the number. You never know what you might find. For me, I have a road trip plan arising from this analysis as Purdue travels to Boston College on September 26. Let's hope the season actually takes place.

Best,

Sean