FanPost

It's Official: Cowboys Have Best Draft in NFL! Proof Here!

It’s official! The Dallas Cowboys had the best draft in the league in 2013!

Well, at least according to one interpretation.

Using the numerical player grades provided at NFL.com, the Dallas Cowboys had the HIGHEST AVERAGE PLAYER GRADE for their collective draft class. Basically, if you take the grade of each member in a draft class, add them all up, and then divide them by the total number of players in that class, you get the average grade value per player. And it isn’t even that close...

Here are Dallas’ picks and their grades:

  1. Travis Frederick 78.7
  2. Gavin Escobar 79.0
  3. Terrance Williams 83.6
  4. J.J. Wilcox 77.0
  5. B.W. Webb 74.0
  6. Joseph Randle 80.6
  7. DeVonte Holloman 70.5

    AVERAGE: 77.6

According to the grading legend, scores between 70-84 fall under the category “Eventual Starter” with an expected draft round of 2nd - 3rd. So, according to at least one grading system of some repute, every single Cowboys pick had a 2nd or 3rd round grade! In a draft where there may have only been 15-20 legitimate 1st round grades, that is pretty remarkable!

And keep in mind, this isn’t some flukey 3-player class. Dallas picked a full cohort of 7 players (albeit with two selections in the 3rd and none in the 7th, which certainly helps the average). And obviously teams with multiple compensatory picks in the latter rounds find their averages dragged down as a result, but still, the numbers say the Cowboys got better value per player than any other team.

I guess the ‘Best Player Available’ strategy was indeed in effect, huh?

For those interested in how the rest of the league stacked up, here’s the list:

Position – Team - # Players Drafted – Avg. Player Grade

1. DAL 7 77.6

2. NYJ 7 75.9

3T. ARZ 9 75.2

3T. NO 5 75.2

5. PHI 8 74.8

6. STL 7 74.4

7. SD 6 73.4

8. MIN 9 72.3

9. TEN 8 72.0

10. MIA 9 71.6

11T. CIN 10 70.9

11T. WSH 7 70.9

13. CLE 5 70.4

14. CHI 6 70.3

15. CAR 5 70.2

16. JAX 8 69.9

17. DEN 7 69.7

18. IND 7 69.0

19. NYG 7 68.4

20. BAL 10 68.0

21. TB 6 67.9

22. ATL 8 67.5

23. HOU 9 67.1

24T. PIT 9 67.0

24T. BUF 8 67.0

24T. KC 8 67.0

27. OAK 10 66.7

28. SF 11 66.3

29. NE 7 66.0

30. DET 9 65.9

31. GB 11 64.9

32. SEA 11 63.2

Note, at the time of writing this there were 6 players without any grade at all. For these, I arbitrarily assigned a value of 49.9, which is just below the minimum grade given to the rated players.

Another user-created commentary provided by a BTB reader.