sportsjabber.net

On Tuesday this week, we looked at how NFL Network draft analyst Mike Mayock ranked the top five players per position in this year’s draft.

Rankings like that always lead to interesting questions about positional value. Is a tackle more valuable than a corner or a pass rusher? Is the second best defensive end a better pick than the top-rated guard? A lot of this will of course depend on the individual player grades, but assuming two players have the exact same grade and also meet an equally big need, which player do you pick?

These are tricky questions to consider as you build your draft board or engage in a mock draft exercise. One way to approach the question is to look at the history of when the top players at each position were picked in previous drafts – and that’s exactly what we’ll do after the jump.

In the following analysis, I looked at the top four players by position and where these top four were picked in the last ten drafts, from 2002 through 2011. The base data is taken from Pro-football-reference.com, and I calculated the average draft spot over those ten years for each position.

Here is an overview of when the first four players at every position were drafted on average in the last twelve years:

READ THE REST…