The @Harvard_Sports 2021 Draft Report is officially live, chock-full of charts & insights.

Team/GM trends in...
- drafting success
- draft pick trading tendencies & surplus
- positional capital allocation
- case studies & popular narratives
- much more

http://harvardsportsanalysis.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/HSAC-NFL-Draft-Report.html

"The... Patriots’ ability to maintain high expected - and realized - returns despite winning consistently over this period speaks to their organizational intelligence in draft pick trading and acquiring compensatory picks through player development..."

http://harvardsportsanalysis.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/HSAC-NFL-Draft-Report.html

"We can also look at which individual players have most over and underperformed relative to expectation... Most of the names you see are the usual suspects..."

http://harvardsportsanalysis.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/HSAC-NFL-Draft-Report.html

"Here, we compare AV over expected with team winning percentage, and it doesn’t take more than a glance to observe the strong, positive association."

http://harvardsportsanalysis.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/HSAC-NFL-Draft-Report.html

"It’s really hard to draft well consistently... the really good drafters have all made very few selections (Brandon Beane, John Lynch, John Dorsey), and the larger bubbles tend to cluster towards the middle (à la regression to the mean)."

http://harvardsportsanalysis.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/HSAC-NFL-Draft-Report.html

"As one further measure of whether selection success is truly skill-based (and hence replicable), we examine the correlation between general managers’ success in year n and year n+1"

http://harvardsportsanalysis.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/HSAC-NFL-Draft-Report.html

"One axis by which to measure drafting preferences is the level of investment in various position groups."

http://harvardsportsanalysis.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/HSAC-NFL-Draft-Report.html

"While teams clearly draft to address existing weaknesses, the extremes likely result from a dual effect: teams who draft poorly witness poor performance, and this perpetuates the cycle of preexisting weaknesses."

http://harvardsportsanalysis.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/HSAC-NFL-Draft-Report.html

"One way to analyze drafting tendencies is through variance in outcomes above expected: if there is high variance in performance over expected, the team is drafting many players who either significantly over- or underproduce (i.e., “boom-or-bust”)."

http://harvardsportsanalysis.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/HSAC-NFL-Draft-Report.html

"Given that teams who trade more often have accumulated more surplus from trades, we pose... a pattern of stronger knowledgeable teams preying on less informed, less active market participants is likely to arise."

http://harvardsportsanalysis.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/HSAC-NFL-Draft-Report.html

"At the team level we do observe a clustering of higher surplus values on the bottom left frontier of the scatterplot, indicating that generally, those who trade back and into the future extract more surplus from trading."

http://harvardsportsanalysis.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/HSAC-NFL-Draft-Report.html

"While Belichick has often been categorized as an excellent trader but poor picker, our results suggest otherwise... his draft surplus numbers are the fifth-highest among 20 GMs with at least 10 trades."

http://harvardsportsanalysis.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/HSAC-NFL-Draft-Report.html

Big shoutout to @LeeSharpeNFL for his incredible trade database, @benbbaldwin for his repo of team colors/logos, and the fine folks at @pfref for AV data/GM info.

PS- Working on a Shiny app so you can play with the team- and GM-level data yourself.