The NFL Draft is one of my favorite parts of being a football fan, and evaluating it has become a treasured past time of mine.

As loyalists to Windy City Gridiron may know, I have been covering the NFL Draft on this website since 2017, often with a Bears slant. For those newer to the site or for those who have no idea who I am, you can understand that growing up a Bears fan would make someone particularly interested in the draft.

I’m hardly a professional scout, and there are people for whom talent evaluation is a full-time job. Those people do a lot more prep work than me and probably know a lot more than me, too. I’m just a guy who likes to watch football in his free time, and after picking up bits and pieces along the way, some people come to enjoy my analysis.

All this to say, draft evaluation should be a constantly evolving process. Nobody hits on 100% of their evaluations. Hell, if we’re being realistic, nobody hits on 50% of their evaluations. That said, you can try to minimize those mistakes by learning from the past.

I wanted to put together a quantifiable number on how accurate or inaccurate my draft analysis actually is. Not only does this provide some public accountability, but it also helps me see which evaluations I’ve aced and which ones I bombed.

For the sake of this argument, I will be using Pro Football Reference’s Absolute Value statistic. To me, it’s the best quantifiable, individual statistic that measures a player’s value of play each year.

To put together these differentials, I put all 178 rookies who ended the year with an Absolute Value score of 1 or above, and I compared them to my top 75 prospects in my final big board. I calculated the absolute value of PFR’s AV minus the ranking on my board.

The lower the differential, the more accurate my big board’s ranking was in terms of how they performed in Year 1. There were a few players who didn’t tally an Absolute Value score — most of whom having dealt with serious injuries their first year — so their differential grade would be 179 (the absolute value of 179-0=179, and since there were 178 rookies with AV scores, all players with an AV score of 0 tied for 179th in the league).

Just as all sports statistics are, it’s not a perfect system. This doesn’t account as much for missed time due to injury. For the sake of one specific season, one could argue that AV earned per game would be a better scale. However, the cliche goes that the best ability is availability, and just as consistent injury issues would affect a player’s value, so too do injuries in this differential equation.

If you want to rank the entire 2024 NFL Draft class by Absolute Value, use the link I provided above and sort by wAV. If enough people are interested, I may do this with my other big boards from years past.

Judging off of these scores, a differential of 10 or below is a stellar evaluation. A differential of 11 through 32 is pretty good, seeing as though I got the player’s approximate round value correct. Anything from 32 to 64 is a mediocre evaluation. If the differential score reaches above 65, I consider that to be a straight-up miss.

Without further ado, this is the absolute value differential of my top 75 players in the 2024 NFL Draft.

Takeaways

It’s worth noting that a verdict on a player should not be reached after just their rookie seasons. There are many rookies who struggle out of the gate, only to find their way down the stretch and develop into a star player. Conversely, we’ve seen a handful of flash-in-the-pan prospects who star as rookies and fizzle out soon after.

That said, I’m noticing a lot of my top prospects ended up living up to the hype. This isn’t necessarily surprising, as these guys are early first-round picks for a reason. Of my top 10 players, I nailed seven evaluations, had one pretty good one, one mediocre evaluation and one massive flop.

Given the surroundings, I have faith the Rome Odunze and Olu Fashanu rankings will look better as they both step into bigger roles in 2024. Dallas Turner had the misfortune of playing behind two Pro Bowlers in Jonathan Greenard and Andrew Van Ginkel, eating into his playing time significantly. He was hardly impressive when he did play, though. That could teach me to better prioritize polished skill sets early at the edge rusher position.

Out of my other nailed evaluations, a vast majority of the players were polished prospects with elite Relative Athletic Score grades. Xavier Legette wasn’t super refined but still possessed tremendous physical talent, and the Panthers accounted for those strengths and weaknesses pretty well in 2024. Kamari Lassiter didn’t test out of this world, but he passed the eye test for me, and so far, that’s paying off.

The other players outside of my top 30 that I nailed — Wilson, Green, Bullard, Beebe, Bullock and Nubin — all had sound, quality tape and, out of the players with RAS grades, all tested very well.

Some of my big misses missed a majority of the 2024 season due to injury. Those evaluations I’ll circle back on once they’ve had more reps to build off of. There are a few glaring ones, though, particularly at wide receiver.

Most of my best wide receiver evaluations were polished route runners with high RAS scores. Most of my worst evaluations were either lacking one or the other. Not only is size-adjusted athleticism important, though, but general athleticism for the position is. If a player doesn’t hit that second gear as a runner, it might be tougher for them to create separation, especially if they aren’t overly huge like a Keon Coleman.

Some of my bigger misses were wiry types like Roman Wilson, D.J. James and Troy Franklin. Nate Wiggins showed flashes but just barely avoided a flat-out miss grade on my board, and he fits the criteria, as well. That’s an archetype I may need to be more cautious on, particularly among receivers and defensive backs.

It’s possible some of my misses turn around — a good handful of these players ended up in situations where they had proven, veteran talent ahead of them on the depth chart. Likewise, it’s possible some of my hits don’t age so well.

That said, I wanted to provide some sort of method to look into where I’ve graded correctly as a wannabe scout and where I’ve missed. Who knows? With this formula, maybe you could have some fun with it yourself.