2024 Consensus Big Board: The Top 300 Players in the 2024 NFL Draft, According to 101 Analysts

The 2024 Consensus Big Board is live. 300 players are ranked using data from 101 draft analysts. What makes this consensus board unique? What can we learn from it?

Photo by Chris Trotman/Getty Images.

This is the Consensus Big Board for the 2024 NFL Draft. As often as possible, I’ve tried to provide it free, without subscription, to as many people as possible. To that end, this piece is free to everyone, as is the data.

[Updated as of April 25, with five new boards added]

The insights generated from the board, which include analysis like who the most polarizing players are in the draft, the difference between evaluators and forecasters and post-draft team grades will continue to be subscriber-exclusives. At the moment, they are:

• What is Variance and Who Are the Most Polarizing Players in the Draft?

• Which Draft Analysts Predict Player Outcomes The Best?

• Why Are the Consensus Boards Different?

• What’s the Difference Between a Forecaster Board and an Evaluator Board?

• Printable Consensus Big Board

Upcoming:

• The 2024 Consensus Board Grades Your Team’s NFL Draft

Even if you don’t want to read those pieces, I would urge a subscription to keep efforts like this running; this project takes dozens of hours every year and many of the boards in use are proprietary and behind paywalls.

What Makes This Consensus Board Different?

There are, by now, a half-dozen or so consensus boards out there. In some respects, they are more useful than this one – many of them have been running throughout the season, giving us a good barometer for a player’s stock and giving fans a genuine look at the players they might want to pay attention to during bowl games.

They also happen to be more focused, with particular emphasis on big-media boards, preventing unorthodox and uninformed rankings from polluting the system.

But I believe there’s a lot of value in this board, too. Every year, I’ve been able to gather anywhere between 50 and 90 big boards to provide a larger survey on the industry’s feelings about prospects in the draft.

For more on that topic, check out this piece.

This year, so far, I have data from 101 boards.

I’ve been able to use the size of that data to leverage unique insights, like the ones described above. Using just ten boards wouldn’t give us a meaningful understanding of variance in player rankings and they don’t have the ability to split boards by type.

The boards used in this ranking are all updated in the month of April — some consensus boards take the average of all boards, including ones from the same analyst multiple times over many months

On top of that, there’s value in the approach I take to the board, which isn’t to average out the ranks across the industry but to average out the implied player values. There is admittedly more transparency in the approach that averages out player ranks across big boards but it has the unfortunate side effect of suggesting that the difference between 145th and 147th is the same as the difference between 1st and 3rd.

In the NFL draft, that’s not how player ranks or player value works – the decision to rank a player first is a big decision; it signifies that teams should be willing to move heaven and earth to acquire that kind of player. That’s not the case at 145th.

Often, players ranked between 145th and 147th aren’t all that different. But the differences between the two are treated as the same in most consensus methods.

The data below is downloadable using a link at the bottom (labeled “Get the data”) and the 300 players are separated into three 100-player pages; an arrow in the upper-right can help you navigate between them. The table is also searchable and sortable.

In the table, there are three ranks. The first rank is the overall consensus rank of that player across all 101 big boards. The second rank is the rank among “Forecasters,” generally a group of draft analysts with access to some team information and sourced data on prospects. The third column is the rank among “Evaluators,” or draft analysts who rely primarily on publicly available data, like combine results and tape.

The final column is the variance column. It tells us how much analysts disagreed on a player and has been adjusted for rank — because otherwise the most polarizing prospects would be the ones ranked 200-300 every year. A score of 100 means that the disagreement among analysts was fairly average. Every step up or down by 15 points represents a big shift — prospects with a variance score of 115 are quite polarizing while those with a score of 85 are well-agreed upon.

If you want a printable Google Sheet, click here.