2024 Consensus Big Board: Who Are the Most Polarizing Players in the NFL Draft? Does That Matter?

The Consensus Big Board isn't out yet, but we can draw insights from the early data. Who are, objectively, the most polarizing players in the 2024 NFL Draft? Does it matter?

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Every year, when constructing the Consensus Big Board, I’ve been able to get not just the composite analysis of industry experts but also the degree to which there are disagreements between analysts on certain players.

This allows us to get a cleaner understanding of who the most polarizing prospects in the NFL Draft are. Often, players who provoke the most discussion can seem like the most polarizing prospect in the draft, but are not.

As an example, an early version of the Consensus Big Board in 2014 found that Jadeveon Clowney, who was subject to constant questions about his work ethic and production, was near-universally considered the top prospect in the draft.

This has been the case for a number of top prospects, though not quite as emphatically so as with the Clowney example. Divisive conversations surrounding Ed Oliver, Myles Garrett, Jamal Adams, Jerry Jeudy, Will Fuller and DJ Moore didn’t materialize into a real divergence in rankings.

On the other hand, some players drew dramatic disagreements between analysts without much hot-take style press on how they’d fail or succeed. These include players like Jonathan Allen, Keanu Neal, John Ross, Austin Jackson, Jamin Davis and Charles Harris.

We’ll go over who the most polarizing players are in this year’s draft, but before that I want to discuss which players have been the most polarizing over the life of the Consensus Big Board project and whether or not this quirk of the data has turned into a way to project player outcomes.

Do Polarizing Players Boom or Bust More Often?

Using data from the 2016-2021 NFL drafts, we can roughly estimate the value of each pick and the expected pick value for each selection in the NFL draft. Using the formula devised to evaluate analyst draft boards – one built off of snaps played and PFF wins above replacement – we can get a roughly accurate ranking of players in the NFL.

I say “roughly,” because analysts and fans will never agree on an absolute ranking of any players, much less players across multiple positions and multiple years. This serves as a fairly good proxy, however.

Let’s look at the most polarizing players in those drafts – defined by the variance across analysts once we account for their board rank. Each player’s variance is calculated across each analyst using a common variance calculation – squaring the difference between each individual value and the final ranking and adding up those squared values. The final ranking is simply an outlier-adjusted value average (not rank average) across the analysts.

Then, the variance is adjusted for rank value. It may seem like we’ve already done this by using the rank value to initially calculate variance, but it needs to be done after the fact as well. The reasoning is simple – the difference between the 99th-best player in the draft and 120th-best player in the draft is far smaller than the difference between the 9th-best player in the draft and the 30th-best player in the draft.

Analysts know that they are disagreeing sharply with one another when they say a player is not worthy of a top-five pick but instead worth a top-ten pick but not when they say that a Day 3 player should be in or out of the Top 100.

Because differences separating players are smaller the further down the draft board one goes – something reflected in every single trade chart you see – the variances will be wider in how these players are ranked among analysts. So, once we adjust for that, we get a true rank-adjusted variance for these players.

The values are pretty meaningless, so I’ve translated them into baseball-style OPS+ scores. Or, if you’re unfamiliar with those, IQ scores. 100 is the average (meaning that a player draws about the normal amount of disagreement you’d expect for a player in his position) while 115 is one standard deviation away in the more polarizing direction – each step of 15 points is basically one tier.

Below are the 30 most polarizing players – selected within the top 100 picks – of those six drafts.

It shouldn’t surprise many people that Josh Allen was the most polarizing player across these draft classes. Though we discussed the disconnect between public discourse and public rankings of players, Allen’s status as a draft prospect was more heavily debated than any other prospect in recent memory, something that was reflected in the boards analysts put together.

More than one analyst ranked Allen as the top prospect in the draft – three of them did. More than twice as many, seven, ranked Allen outside of their top 100. One board ranked him 179th overall. That is probably the lowest ranking in the database for him – “probably” because one analyst with 157 ranked players did not rank Allen.

Given that incredible outcome, polarizing candidates aren’t too bad, right?

Well, aside from Joe Mixon, the next chunk of players doesn’t give us much reason for optimism. Of those 30 players, “only” 10 returned as much or more value than their draft slot. Including Allen, those are Mixon, Spencer Brown, Patrick Mahomes, Chris Jones, Bobby Okereke, Quinn Meinerz, Willie Gay, Milton Williams and Jonathan Allen.

I say “only” here because, as you’ll see later, it’s actually pretty difficult to hit using this definition.

Mahomes and Jones are the two best players at their position and Josh Allen has been an MVP candidate. Not only that, Willie Gay seems to be putting together a more than solid career while Jonathan Allen has been nothing but positive for Washington.

Rashan Gary and Jordan Love are counted as (mild) busts here, but they have seemingly demonstrated the value that the Packers put into them, even if it took some time for that value to be realized.

For the most part, these seem to be fairly dramatic outcomes. Is this true for low-variance players selected in the top 100?