Ranking the 2025 UDFA Classes With the Consensus Big Board

Some teams signed some guys you might have heard of in undrafted free agency. Does that matter? Let's find out who had the most guys you might have heard of and if that helps

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In the days following the draft, I find my mentions light up with people referencing my work in the context of undrafted free agents, which is really neat to see. But until last year, I hadn’t really tested the big board against undrafted free agency.

UDFAs can be some of the most impactful players on the team; teams really aren’t complete without a good complement of those players and — because there are so many more of them in camp — they are often large proportions of every NFL roster.

Getting this right isn’t as important as nailing the first- or second-round picks, but it can be an important piece to the puzzle.

One issue with doing this is that there’s uncertainty with tracking UDFA signings. Collin Schlee, for example, was reported as both a signee and a camp tryout for the Washington Commanders. The signing was reported by the Virginia Tech Twitter account while the reporting on Schlee’s tryout status came from reporter Ben Standig, who also reported that Schlee would be attending Ravens minicamp.

In that specific case, we can be reasonably confident that Standig’s report is correct because he gives additional details and specificity matters. But there are dozens of cases where we get conflicting information and not all of them are as simple to parse as this.

Teams will be updating their UDFA classes and reports are seemingly always incomplete until we get to rookie minicamp, so understand that the grades you see are based on information that’s as accurate as possible, but difficult to fully get right.

For my most up-to-date information, I use Alex Katson’s NFL Draft Tracker, which has also been turned into a good tool for tracking free agent signings.

With that information in hand, we can start creating scores for undrafted free agent classes – determining which teams navigated that market the best and who didn’t.

Can the Consensus Board Predict UDFA Success?

The Consensus Board is pretty good at predicting player outcomes for drafted players, but teams spend much more time and money on figuring out players outside of the Top 100, right?

The strength of the board has much to do with the number of analysts that contribute to it, with over 100 different approaches to solving the same problem. But as we get further down the board, there are fewer participants with opinions on players.

There are 112 rankings for top-ranked Travis Hunter, 100 for 80th-ranked Shemar Turner, 75 for 124th-ranked Dorian Strong, 50 for 212th-ranked Collin Oliver and so on. The board up to 300 is quite robust – 30 rankings for Marcus Wehr is solid, especially given the fact that the first big board project in 2015 only had rankings from 45 or so boards at all.

But 500th-ranked Micah Bernard? 15 boards. 565th-ranked Brandon Crossley has only three boards ranking him. So it might be fair not to see value in the extended rankings of the Consensus Big Board – and it’s why I don’t typically put together a Top 500, instead releasing a Top 300.

There’s good reason to be confident in its ability to project draft outcomes, but not UDFA outcomes.

But we have a few years of history to test. How has it done?