Draft simulation for the best player available

It’s the Sunday before the 2022 NFL Draft, which means fans across the league are bent on the surefire Day 1 superstar their team will add, as well as the Day 3 gems that will change forever. the future of their favorite franchise.

For Pete Carroll and John Schneider of the Seattle Seahawks, that means holding their best draft picks since their first draft in charge of the team in 2010. Fans are both excited and terrified that the player could be chosen with choice nine. Seattle fans have seen safe first-round picks turn into busts, and so the debate between picking the best player available versus drafting when needed has been raging for weeks.

Obviously, one of the biggest factors in what the Hawks do when they come on the clock Thursday in the first round will be what the eight teams ahead of them have done. This will determine not only which players are available for Seattle, but also which players may have dropped to ninth place and are attractive enough that other teams feel the need to trade to fill in the missing piece.

Anyway, I don’t watch college football much, because as a University of Kansas alumnus, I graduated from a school that doesn’t have a football team, ie say on a scale of 1 to 10 my knowledge of prospects entering Draft is somewhere between 1 and 2, rounding up to 1.

So, in order to respond to the FOMO of the sim draft frenzy of the past few weeks and months, I’ve done three different sim drafts conducted based on picking the best player available without considering team needs. To define the best player available, I simply selected the highest ranked player available each time the Seahawks came on the clock using three different prospect rankings:

Without wasting any more time, here’s how each of the three simulations turned out for Seattle.

PFF Grand Council

1.9: S Kyle Hamilton, Notre Dame
2:40 p.m.: SU Travis Jones, Connecticut
2.41: CB Jalen Pitre, Baylor
3.72: LB Brian Asamoah, Oklahoma
4.109: T Kellen Diesch, Arizona State
5.152: C Joshua Williams, UNC Pembroke
5.153: T Matt Walitzko, North Dakota
7.229: QB Brock Purdy, Iowa State

Arif Hasan Consensus Grand Council

1.9: S Kyle Hamilton, Notre Dame
2:40 p.m.: WR Jahan Dotson, Penn State
2.41: CB Kyler Gordon, Washington
3.72: T Daniel Faalele, Minnesota
4.109: RB Isaiah Spiller, Texas A&M
5.152: TE Isaiah Likely, Coastal Carolina
5.153: RB Brian Robinson Jr, Alabama
7.229: T Dare Rosenthal, Kentucky

ESPN Draft Player Rankings – 2022

1.9: S Kyle Hamilton, Notre Dame
2:40 p.m.: QB Kenny Pickett, Pittsburgh
2.41: WR Jahan Dotson, Penn State
3.72: DI Phidarian Mathis, Alabama
4.109: LB Damone Clark, LSU
5.152: WR Velus Jones Jr, Tennessee
5.153: Ed Amare Barno, Virginia Tech
7.229: WR Dai’Jean Dixon, Nicholls State

So welcome to Seattle, Kyle Hamilton.

These results are most certainly unrealistic, but it is obvious that the draft is not simply about taking the best player available, regardless of position. Of course, if a top-notch prospect is available in a position that isn’t necessarily a position of immediate need for the Seahawks at nine, getting that player drafted isn’t the end of the world. However, once a team enters the heart of the draft, whether a player has the highest rating or the second-highest rating or the fifth-highest rating is probably irrelevant. Once past those prospects who are unquestionably the best, the human element of evaluation and rating has likely influenced the ratings to the point where selecting the best player available who meets a need is just as likely to give a player quality as the selection of the player that occurs. have a slightly higher project evaluation score.

In any case, you never know how things will turn out, regardless of the pre-draft assessment, for various reasons. For example, someone could take a list of ten college players who had been called up for their work ethic by their coaches and see that while a few of them went on to become quality NFL players, others ended up becoming career mates for some reason.

Ultimately, the draft is an inexact science, and only one tool is available to teams as they build their rosters for 2022 and beyond.