The morning after ...

168 players were drafted last evening. How well each of us drafted might only be clear once the season gets underway but what I wanted to see was from the NFL teams perspective, what do the NJ Rookies like? Are there some NFL teams that we prefer over the others? We will look closely at this aspect of the draft this week.

First, let's start with a quiz: Based on the fact that our rosters need us to start 2 WRs, 1 RB and 1 RB/WR and based on the fact that WRs and RBs do tend to be the most popular picks in a draft, considering sheer numbers alone, who do you think got drafted most? WRs or RBs and by how much? Answer is at the end of the article.

So, getting back to analyzing if indeed we do love some teams more than others. There are 32 teams in the NFL and there are 168 draft positions. 5 seconds alone with a calculator and you will come to a conclusion that if all teams were created equal, we'd draft 5.25 players per team. More realistically (since some teams are better than others), about 4 - 7 players from each NFL team would have been drafted. So what happened? I found out that this assumption was almost true. MOST NFL teams had between 4 and 7 players drafted.

Out of the ones that we did not, there were 3 teams which we all clearly loved to draft from. Any guesses? All 3 of these NFL teams had 8 players from their team who we liked. The answers are:
1) Vikings (Favre, at 40, is still god damn popular!) (2RB, 2WR, QB, DST, K, TE)
2) Eagles (LOL! No doubt. Except for Niral, I think all of us are closet Eagles fans) (2RB, WR, 2QB, DST, K, TE)
3) Chargers!!! (this one surprised me as well!) (2RB, 2WR, QB, DST, K, TE)

Oh and here is another interesting tidbit: Other than the 3 teams above, the Chicago Bears were the only team which had a player drafted in every position. (There are 6 positions: QB, RB, WR, TE, DST, K). None of the other 28 teams had a "full" draft. Interesting shit eh!

So who did we not like. Turns out, we don't really like a lot of teams. 5 to be precise. So from the 5 teams below, we only picked 2 players each! Thats a total of only 10 players from these 5 teams!!!
1) STL
2) SF
3) Oak (Other 4 teams on this list have a RB and WR drafted ... Oak has a RB and TE ... so we have not picked even a single WR from Oak ... something to think about!)
4) Det
5) Cle

So if you are unhappy with your team and want to change a player or two, you should definitely look at the teams above since you literally have their whole roster available to chose from. One good example is Josh Cribbs -- undrafted!

Here is the complete list:
Number of players -- Teams
-------------------------------------
2 -- Cle Det Oak SF StL
4 -- Cin Jac KC Mia TB Was
5 -- Atl Buf GB Hou Sea
6 -- Bal Den Ind NO NYJ Pit
7 -- Ari Car Chi Dal NE NYG Ten
8 -- Min Phi SD

Before we go, let's take a more high level view.
We were actually quite consistent in picking from conferences and divisions.
We picked 82 players from AFC and 86 from NFC (pretty even ... although I would have thought AFC would beat out the NFC).
In AFC (East, North, South and West) we picked 22, 18, 22 and 20 players each respectively (again, consistent here too.).
In NFC, we botched it a little bit. Again we picked 22 players from NFC North and South which is fine ... but since we live on the East coast and watch a lot of NFC East games, we drafted 26 players from the NFC East and being so far away from the West and not as exposed, we chose to go with only 16 players from NFC West.

So that's it for this week. Congratulations to you if you have read this far. If Meghna & Niral help me set up the DB and the Front End and if you guys help me throughout the season by entering some data, I promise you lots more of these mindless stats! ... oh and I'd like to say one more thing -- I think I am falling in love with Pivot Tables in Excel! LOL

Cheers!
Murtaza

PS: The answer is WR! ... Out of the 168 players, we drafted 52 WRs and 49 RBs. Rendezvous with a calculator again and find out that 60% of our total draft strength are either WRs or RBs.