When Dennis Shaffer and his team at Ohio State analyzed 2,544 NFL draft picks spanning a decade, they uncovered something that upends a core assumption of professional football: where a player is selected tells you almost nothing about how well they'll actually perform on the field.
For years, NFL teams have operated on the intuitive belief that draft position matters—that a player chosen early in round one will outperform someone plucked in round four or five. The NFL itself reinforces this thinking through its value charts, which assign exponentially higher trade values to early picks, and through rookie salary structures that heavily reward higher draft positions. Yet Shaffer's research, recently published in The Sport Journal, reveals a disconnect between what teams believe and what the data shows.
The researchers gathered data on every player drafted between 2011 and 2020, then cross-referenced that information with actual performance statistics from each player's first four seasons in the league, using Pro Football Focus grades to measure real-world outcomes. The results were stark: higher-drafted players did not perform significantly better than lower-drafted ones, particularly within the same round. Most strikingly, predictors of performance based on draft position had no relationship to actual results for players chosen in the 4th and 5th rounds.
There's a second finding that challenges current practice even more directly. Teams that traded down for draft picks—moving down the board in exchange for additional selections—showed better outcomes than teams that traded up to snag players earlier. This advantage contradicts the entire framework on which the NFL currently builds its value charts. "For what the NFL is currently doing, performance doesn't bear out according to draft values or rookie contracts," Shaffer explained. "It doesn't matter how you look at it in terms of valuation, in trade values or rookie salaries, which are greater for higher picks."
The study doesn't suggest that draft position is irrelevant—instead, it shows the connection is simply weaker than teams assume. Part of this stems from the inherent subjectivity of player evaluation. As Shaffer notes, different teams approach the draft from different angles based on their own positional needs, meaning consensus on who "should" go first rarely exists. Teams aren't wrong in their assessments; they're just working from a faulty hierarchy.
There is a silver lining for drafted players themselves. While higher draft position means a larger initial salary, it has little bearing on lifetime earnings. A player selected at the bottom of the second round can expect to earn as much over their entire career as a peer drafted at the top of that same round—and potentially more, if their performance sustains longer in the league. Draft position determines the starting line, but not the finish.
The study concludes with a pragmatic recommendation: teams should reconsider the foundations of their draft value charts. Rather than basing trade decisions on what other teams paid historically, executives might benefit from grounding their strategy in actual performance data. As Shaffer puts it, this shift could ensure "their sports intuition better aligns with eventual outcomes." The path forward isn't about ignoring draft position entirely, but rather about recognizing its limits and rebuilding the system on evidence rather than assumption.