How it’s going … and how it started
Of this year's 257 NFL Draft picks, 127 transferred during their college careers. Are we measuring pro development wrong in this era?
You’ve seen the doom and gloom surrounding the rich getting richer, how this past weekend’s NFL Draft was just the latest example of the power conferences stealing and hogging all of the talent, sucking the star power out of the smaller conferences and reaping the benefits of the hard work that others put in while developing these guys years earlier.
Well, we crunched the numbers after the 257-pick draft, and we are here to tell you …
… that everyone is mostly right.
But how should we measure who gets credit for whom when it comes to NFL development? Sticking a player with the school he most recently played for is the simplest way for us to identify where everyone comes from, but is it the fairest or most accurate way when 127 of the 257 drafted players transferred at least once during their college careers?
This is a new-world problem in college football, not unlike the Senior Day dilemma that my Substack brethren Bill Landis and Doug Lesmerises have astutely brought up.
(Long story short: Carnell Tate didn’t get a Senior Day at Ohio State. Grad transfers who spent four years elsewhere did.)
It doesn’t make sense.
The draft breakdowns here make a little bit more sense, but the numbers do reflect a slightly different narrative than what’s out there right now.
