Consensus Big Board: The History of “Best Available” on Day 2
Every year, we precede Day 2 of the NFL draft with "Best Available" lists. Are they any good? And who are those players this year?
For those following the Consensus Big Board project, Day 2 is arguably as exciting as Day 1, as teams pounce on the astounding value left on the board at the top of the second round. Players who “fell” in the draft from their original big board position are seen as incredible finds – but is that really all that useful?
The headlines of draft classes are built on the first round, but the strength of classes are created in the second and third rounds. People remember the Vikings 2015 class not for Trae Waynes, but for Waynes, Eric Kendricks, Danielle Hunter and Stefon Diggs.
The 2017 New Orleans Saints draft class is remembered not for Marshon Lattimore but for Lattimore alongside Alvin Kamara, Marcus Williams, Ryan Ramczyk and Trey Hendrickson.
Conversely, the Chiefs 2017 class was outstanding in terms of total value because of Patrick Mahomes (and Kareem Hunt), but no one really calls it a good draft class so much as an outstanding pick.
So as teams turn draft classes from good picks into good hauls, who are the best candidates to do so? And can we always identify them?
As a note, this is another free piece about the Consensus Big Board. 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, sometimes significant ones.
How Often Do Day 2 “Steals” Become Good Players?
We know that the Consensus Board is generally pretty good at identifying talent and that they can compete with the NFL over a long time span when it comes to finding players that will make an impact.
But that might be different in some way in particular areas of the draft. The NFL or the draft analysts who contribute to the Consensus Board may be better or worse when it comes to the most high-profile players – those expected to go in the first round and therefore have the most time investment from scouts (league-affiliated or otherwise).
I looked at all the players who were graded as “top 32” players according to the Consensus Big Board available on Day 2 of the draft since 2015.
This is a great list of players, in my opinion. When just looking at those who ended up getting picked in the second round, the impact rate is high. For 2015-2021, where we can be confident about the player outcomes, about half of the players ended up making a big impact, similar to what we might expect of a first-round pick.
The highlights, to me, include Eric Kendricks, Xavier McKinney, Owa Odighizuwa, Landon Dickerson, Budda Baker, Courtland Sutton, Byron Murphy and Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah.
In recent draft classes, I think it’s easy to be confident about Brian Branch, Cooper DeJean and Ladd McConkey.
For context, it’s important to understand that the number of “impact players,” in any draft class is fairly low. Depending on one’s definition of an “impact player,” that list might be as small as 30.
Only about half of those will be in the first round, with the rest distributed across the draft – players like Dak Prescott, Chris Jones, Tyreek Hill, Stefon Diggs, Alvin Kamara, Joe Thuney and so on.
From 2015 to 2021, only 493 players – 70 per class – started at least 8.0 games per season. Just about 50 players per class start at least 10.0 games per season. This includes players like Elijah Moore, Deion Jones, Jahlani Tavai, Ronald Darby and so on – players that provided value but would not be considered impact players by most people’s definition.
About 95 of those 10.0-plus start players, or 13 per year, were drafted between picks 32 and 64. About 65 of them were impact players by our arbitrary definition, or 9 per year. As a quick cross-check, only 61 players earned an Approximate Value of 6.0 or greater per year, according to Pro-Football-Reference, which is a pretty good cut-off.
That just barely includes players like Landon Collins, Byron Murphy and Erik McCoy and just barely excludes Ezra Cleveland, Joe Tryon-Shoyinka and Will Hernandez. There are some quibbles on either side of the line – Miles Sanders is a hit by this measure while Willie Gay is a miss – but this is good for getting the large-scale percentage.
I think this gives us a good baseline to say that a hit rate of just under 50 percent in the second round is somewhat significant. About 18 to 22 players of the 45 who were drafted in the second identified as first-round talents went on to have a big impact, it seems.
But to really get a good sense of how important this might be, let’s take a look at second-round players who were the next-best available on Day 2 – the top 60 players ranked outside of 32 that were drafted in the second round.
There are some good players on this list – McCoy, Deebo Samuel, Derrick Henry, Nick Chubb, Tee Higgins, Antoine Winfield Jr., Dallas Goedert and so on – but it really seems like a less impressive list.
And when counting up the “impact player rate” – something you can feel free to disagree with me about, there seems to be far fewer of them. About 13 or 14 of the 51 players drafted between 2015 and 2021, or 25-ish percent. That’s half the hit rate of the higher-ranked “first-round grade” players.
We can disagree about individual players – you might not think Owusu-Koramoah is an impact player and that Samuel Cosmi is, and those would be reasonable arguments – but I don’t think the broad numbers change here; especially when I excluded players like Harold Landry and JK Dobbins from the list of hits in the first list, both of whom could be candidates for the success category.
Generally, it seems as if second-round players graded by the consensus board as first-round talents seem to have a bigger impact than those graded as second-round talents.
There will always be misses – I’m surprised that Will Hernandez and James Daniels didn’t really work out – but it’s not a bad approach.
So, who might be a candidate to be a “first-round pick” in the second round?
Best Available on Day 2, 2025
The top of the list is explainable – medical concerns with Will Johnson, off-field concerns with Mike Green and a polarizing pocket quarterback in Shedeur Sanders.
Players like Luther Burden III and Nick Emmanwori make sense, too – the book on them seems to be that NFL teams plan to use them differently than they were used in college, which leads to projection challenges.
Of the six players graded as “first-round” talents by the consensus big board, three (on average) will become impact players. I’m curious about who they may be.