One pick in six ever returned anything. The mean is not describing a typical pick in any round; it is describing a lottery, and round one sells the most tickets.
Stint PAR. A pick is credited with everything the player produced for the franchise that made it, for as long as that franchise had him. A stint ends when he starts for somebody else, or when he stops appearing. It does not end when a board mentions his name again.
That last sentence is the whole correction. This is a keeper league: a kept player re-enters the board when he is kept, so the previous metric had kept players truncating their own tenure. 150 board rows were affected. DeAndre Hopkins read +0 for the 2013 pick that got him, and IronCity kept him for eight seasons. He is +274.
A pick that never produced a start counts as zero, not missing. Dropping those 722 picks would flatter every mean below.
Three rounds are positive on the mean and only round one survives losing its best pick. Round three averages +1.7; take Aaron Rodgers out and it averages −1.4. Round ten averages −0.8; take Mahomes out and it averages −2.6. Round one averages +23.8 and still averages +20.9 without McCaffrey.
The median is the number that should stop you. Of the 1,829 picks we can value, 722 returned exactly zero to the franchise that made them, another 785 returned less than nothing, and only 322, one pick in six, returned anything at all. The mean is not describing a typical pick in any round. It is describing a lottery, and round one sells the most tickets: 46 percent of all positive draft value ever created came out of it. Meanwhile 20 percent came from round seven or later, which is where legends are cheap.
Three lines carry the desk. Aaron Rodgers was drafted, once, in 2008, round 3, pick 28, as "Rogers, A", then kept for fifteen straight seasons: the cheapest great pick ever made. The best pick ever made won nothing: McCaffrey's 520 belongs to the only franchise with no titles and no finals. And the second-best pick was made with somebody else's slot: 1.05 of 2016 belonged to the Caleboys, Reggie's used it on Derrick Henry, and Henry never played a down for the Caleboys.
Picks 97 through 100 are the argument of this page in four rows. SMOKERS take Deshaun Watson at 97. Caleboys take a kicker at 98. Alligators take Patrick Mahomes at 99, +291 and counting, the greatest late pick in league history. At 100, IronCity take another kicker.
Round one sells the most tickets. These were bought for nothing. Stint PAR is what the drafting franchise got out of the pick it made, so a man who was traded away counts for the team that drafted him and no further.
Ray Rice is the oldest pick on this list and the only one from the paper era. Sixth round, pick 56, 2008, then five seasons and 61 starts. Nothing else drafted that deep before 2011 returned half as much.
Jamaal Charles was drafted in the eighth round twice, by two different franchises, in consecutive years, and both of them let him go.
He is not on the deep-pick table above and that is the point: the table counts what the drafting franchise got, and neither franchise that drafted him got anything. The third team paid for him.
What they paid is four picks and the archive did not have the trade. The 2011 board carries four Alligators slots with to bus written in the cell: picks 5, 16, 25 and 36. Those are IronCity picks made out of Alligators slots, and Wayne confirms all four are one deal, for Jamaal Charles.
Net +88.8 to the Alligators, and it is the only trade on file where both sides cleared plus a hundred. It is also the trade that produced A.J. Green, who is 23rd on the Ring of Honor, out of a slot IronCity did not own.
One franchise drafts a player, gets nothing, lets him go. Another drafts him later and gets a career. Skill positions only, and the two franchises must differ: a player who reappears on his own team's board is a keeper, not a second chance.
Total stint PAR by the franchise that made the pick, not the one that owned the slot.
A pick that returned nothing, made one to three slots before a pick that became a monster. The gate is career PAR, not what the drafting franchise got: a player who was great somewhere else was never a miss, he was a mistake about timing, and he belongs in the section above.
The 2016 first round deserves its own plaque. The Alligators traded out of pick one, took Corey Coleman at three, and got three weeks out of him. Sterling Shepard went second and became the worst pick in league history. Derrick Henry went fifth, to Reggie's, using the Caleboys' slot. Davante Adams went sixth. Four of the six worst and best outcomes the board has ever produced, inside five picks.
Of the 114 title-core slots (top six contributors, nineteen champions), 96 are skill positions: 52% continuity (kept or held from a previous roster), 24% arrived earlier by trade or the wire and were retained, 10% drafted that year, 6% claimed that year, 7% path not recorded. Kickers and defences hold the other 18 slots and are counted separately: eleven of the eighteen have no recorded acquisition, and folding them in was pushing continuity below half while inflating the unrecorded share from 7 per cent to 16.
A quarter of picks do not resolve to a named player (kickers, defences, deep rounds), so late-round means are soft. Stints are not yet split at mid-season trades. The 2007 founding rosters predate the first surviving board, which is why Brees, Brady, Manning, Calvin Johnson, Peterson and Owens carry no draft price.
One pick in six ever returned anything. The mean is not describing a typical pick in any round; it is describing a lottery, and round one sells the most tickets.