with all the recent talk about trading down it got me curious to see which range of the draft is the best for selecting a quality player. hit the jump to find some interesting results

To start off ill say how I did this. I wasn't extremely scientific in my process but I was as objective as humanly possible. I looked at the 2003 draft to the 2009 draft assesing players in 6 pick frames(picks 1-6, 7-12 etc) until the last two frames where i added an extra player

so it looked something like this

Group A-picks 1-6

Group B-picks 7-12

Group C-picks 13-18

Group D-picks 19-25

Group E-picks 26-32

I then looked at the players drafted and asked myself two questions. Are they a good player regardless of value or where they were selected? If they aren't are they or were they more than "just a guy?"

If they failed in both questions i put them in the miss category and the ones that met the criteria i put in the hit. Now there are several players that presented problems for this(thomas davis, braylon edwards just to name a few) but the trend seemed to stay constant

This is what i found to my suprise

Group A-50% hit rate

Group B-48% hit rate

Group C-57% hit rate

Group D-47% hit rate

Group E-39% hit rate

The first thing that stood out to me was that the highest grouping never hit on all in my calculations so the big six we have been talking about(luck, griffin, kalil, richardson, blackmon, claiborne) historically atleast 1 if not more will end up being average to below average players

The second thing that stood out to me was group C, they showed a higher probability of hits than any other group and that was suprising to me because I figured all groups would be about the same minus the top 6. Why this is the case? idk but it is intriguing to see that there are some variations in the different ranges