Archive for May 8th, 2009

In the last article, Before They Were NFL Stars, we examined which players from the Rivals100 list ended up being chosen in the first day of the NFL Draft between 2006-2009. Those 68 players became the basis of this analysis.

I wanted to know how many of these elite high school athletes become highly sought after in the National Football League. Furthermore, I wanted to test my hypothesis that the top 10 Rivals100 players should be more likely to land in the NFL than the next 10 players, and so on so forth. Basically, of all the Rivals100, the top 10 should produce the greatest number of NFL draft picks, while the players at the bottom 10 of the list should have the least chance. Not only should the top Rivals players have the greatest frequency of being drafted, but they should be chosen higher than their peers, as well.

Methods

The pool of players in this study includes 5 years worth of Rivals100 lists ( a total of 500 players). As mentioned before, I examined how many Rivals players were selected in round 1 or 2 of the Draft.  To evaluate the relationship between Rivals100 status and draft value, the Rivals100 is broken down into 10 groups of 50 players. So, this means that over the 5 years of the study, each group of 10 in the Rivals100  (1-10, 11-20, 21-20, etc) will have a total of 50 players.

How to Read the Tables

Each table below presents exactly the same data, only the first uses raw numbers, and the second uses percentages. To make sure you read the tables correctly, here is how the first line of table 1 reads:

“Of the 50 players ranked 1-10 in Rivals100, 2 of them became 2nd rounders, 16 were 1st rounders, and of those 16 1st rounders, 11 of them were top 10 picks.”

The second table reads like so:

“Of the 50 players ranked 1-10 in Rivals100, 4% of them became 2nd rounders, 32% were 1st rounders, and 22% of the 50 players were top 10 picks.”

[TABLE=8]

[TABLE=9]

Results

Of all the classes of 10, the top 10 players in the Rivals100 were over than three times more likely to become first round draft choices (32%), and over five times more likely to become top 10 draft selections (22%). But overall, my hypothesis was ultimately incorrect. Each respective group of 10 did not yield fewer and fewer NFL draftees. In fact, the bottom 10 produced more 1st rounders than 11-20.

Here are a few final observations from the data:

-in all but one year, the top 2 players in the Rivals100 became 1st round picks. The only time where that was not true happened to be in 2006. Derrick Williams (Penn State) and Patrick Turner (USC) were drafted, but not in the top two rounds.

-Rivals100 completely overlooked certain players such as Jake Long (LT from Michigan, who became the number 1 pick in the 2008 draft.

It is worth noting that a handful of players did not appear in this study because they were not chosen in the top 2 rounds. One prime example was Eric Winston (OG for the Texans), who happens to be one of the best at his position.

*To see enlarged versions of the two graphs above, just click on them!

Conclusion

I have to say that the main conclusion from this study is that the Rivals does a good job at predicting future success of their top 10 Rivals100 players. But outside of that, the correlation weakens considerably.