Pro Football Focus has a new article looking at the positions that teams have spent the most draft capital on over the past few years. This is similar to what I did here three months ago.

Let me review what I like about their approach and add some comments:

  • They used their own PFF WAR metric to measure draft capital of each pick. Although I don’t fully understand their approach, I like trying to quantify value in this way. In my post I looked at draft capital using Jimmy Johnson and Chase Stuart values.
  • They adjusted for the number of positions that are typically on the field at a given time to make comparing the amount invested by position simpler. For example, there is typically one and only one quarterback on the field for a given play, but there are typically at least two cornerbacks.
  • This analysis clearly shows that teams are investing a lot in running backs. As the article notes, this seems to go against what many analysts suggest, because as the saying goes running backs don’t matter.
  • PFFs results were a bit different than mine, but we agreed that teams look to be spending a bit more in recent years on quarterbacks. Beyond using a different measure of draft capital and different position groupings (e.g., they had Edge), PFF also looked at a larger range of years (2006-2020) than I did (2010-2019), perhaps that accounts for some of the differences.

Overall, I’d probably trust their analysis more than mine, and it’s interesting to see the trends - passing continues to take over the league, and teams are allocating too many resources to running backs.