The 2024 NFL Consensus Big Board Grades The Draft

The aggregated opinion of 101 draft analysts might not be what you want to hear, but I have it anyway. Using the ranks of the Consensus Big Board, what can we say about this year's NFL draft classes?

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One of the great things about the Consensus Big Board is that it gives us the opportunity to look back on previous classes and use the data to evaluate how teams did.

With rankings of over 750 players across 101 draft analysts, the Consensus Big Board didn’t miss out on ranking a single player this year. In fact, all the players who were drafted were picked within the top 550 ranks of the Consensus Board, a record.

The lowest rank of a player picked was an international player, OT Travis Clayton from Basingstoke Rugby Football Club in England. He was ranked 524th and picked 221st overall by the Buffalo Bills. After him comes OT Michael Jerrell from Division II Findlay, ranked 472nd and picked 207th by the Seattle Seahawks.

The lowest-ranked Power-5 player was cornerback Jaden Davis from Miami (FL), ranked 454th overall and selected 226th overall by the Arizona Cardinals.

What Does the Consensus Board Know?

Why should we care what the Consensus Big Board says about a team’s draft? Well, importantly, we shouldn’t care too much – all of these things are cloaked in uncertainty and it’s always difficult to tell when players will succeed.

Teams spend millions of dollars on improving their process and still only about 40 percent of first-round picks perform at their pick slot or better.

Nevertheless, the Consensus Big Board gets us a good deal closer than most methods at figuring out if teams did what they needed to do on draft day. We can’t just simply trust teams to be good at this, even if they collectively have more expertise than a random analyst – half of the teams in every NFL draft will have performed poorly!

This isn’t just the analysis performed by Wide Left, either.

Jason Fitzgerald at OverTheCap used the size of second contracts that the Consensus Big Board is about as good as the NFL itself – especially from picks 176 on, with some success at the bottom of the first round and the top of the third round when compared to the NFL.

That’s one kind of analysis, but what’s excellent is that another type of analysis, performed with a completely different methodology, agrees. Timo Riske at Pro Football Focus, using their Wins Above Replacement metric found that the Consensus Big Board performs as well as the NFL draft – despite the Consensus Big Board consistently undervaluing quarterbacks.

Still, should we be a bit skeptical of Consensus Big Board grades if the NFL has outperformed the Consensus Big Board on an aggregate basis? Of course, but no more skeptical than we are of the NFL.

When compared to individual analysts, the Consensus Big Board has historically been one of the best, predicting player outcomes of the top 100 better than all but two boards between 2016 and 2021 and ninth for the whole draft class of players.

The Consensus Big Board certainly isn’t perfect. Neither are NFL teams. So when they disagree, there’s some value in exploring that. Importantly, it very much seems like NFL teams that consistently reach against the Consensus Big Board have poor draft classes.

Steals on the board may not mean much – they slightly overperform even-value picks – but reaches are worth keeping an eye on.

So what happens when we separate it out? Well, in the first round, the Consensus Big Board does an excellent job identifying reaches. Steals, not so much.

The table below uses picks from 2016 to 2021 and excludes data where the Consensus Board and the NFL were within 15 percent of each other when evaluating a player’s value. Joe Burrow, for example, was ranked second by consensus but was picked first overall – hardly fair to call that a reach.

How does it do on Day 2?

The NFL is a bit better when it comes to reaches but still loses to the Consensus. The NFL is still right when it comes to steals, but less significantly so.

Interestingly, the NFL being more correct when it comes to “steals” against the Consensus Board is not where it builds all of its advantage against Consensus. The rest comes from the picks that are not deemed steals or reaches by the Consensus Big Board – small marginal gains, like with Joe Burrow – that don’t really impact our evaluation of either method.

When looking at just steals and reaches, the Consensus Board outpaces the NFL player for player 174-162, a 12-player margin. The NFL made up for it with its 33-player margin of victory on even evaluations.

What this tells us is that both the Consensus Big Board and the NFL are overconfident when they determine they know a player is substantially more talented than where the other has ranked them. And the NFL’s advantage in tailoring their schemes, isolating team need and fit allows them to win at the margins when the differences in evaluation don’t really matter.

Do Steals Still Provide Value?

That doesn’t mean evaluating steals is meaningless; steals still outperform the average pick in the same slot.

This might seem confusing.

If the Consensus Board underperforms the NFL when identifying steals, how can steals overperform against the average NFL pick? The reason is because the first set of tables is about accuracy. Whoever gets closer to nailing that player’s performance gets handed the win. The last table above is just evaluating which player did better.

So if someone is regarded as the 35th-best player in the draft and the NFL selected that player 60th, that would be regarded as a steal. If that player performed like the 50th-best player in the draft, the NFL would have been more accurate about their level of play. But, that player is still outperforming the average pick at 60th overall.

That means it’s good to get steals, but not quite as good as you might think. And it’s bad to get reaches. It’s probably not bad as you think, but it’s pretty bad.

In summary: the NFL slightly outperforms the Consensus Board. A lot of that overperformance against Consensus comes on picks where they don’t substantially disagree. When a player “falls” in the draft, there is a good likelihood that they aren’t as talented as the Consensus Board thinks, but that they are still more talented than the NFL thinks.

When a player is overselected, at least according to consensus, that’s usually a mistake.

There are exceptions to every rule. Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen were both “reaches” by consensus. Dak Prescott and Lamar Jackson were both “steals.” These things happen, but not at dramatically large rates.

The draft is messy. Everyone is usually wrong.

With that in mind, let’s judge the draft.