Some convenient tools for the NFL draft

Apr 25, 2023

This post could be something between a tweet, a note, and a full post, so we’ll just make a full post out of it to give it some room to breathe.

There are a lot of neat tools available right now for the draft enjoyers, and it’s really quite amazing how far things have grown over the past few years. Draft fans used to only have one option for a mock draft simulator (I think it was the Mock Draft Machine at The Draft Network - I could be misremembering here). Now there are several! Big boards have gone from just a list of names to detailed analysis and customization for the end user.

So for draft week, I thought I could do some service by trying to highlight some tools that are out there. Most of them are free as well, and if I missed one, please let me know and I’ll add it.

Grinding the Mocks

https://grindingthemocks.shinyapps.io/Dashboard/

I’m not smart enough to build something like this, but if I were, this is the kind of tool I think I would love to do. I really enjoy the wisdom of the crowd type aggregation, and that’s exactly what Benjamin Robinson did here.

It’s a great portal to dive into where players are expected to go based on thousands (?) of mocks and you might have seen some of Ben’s charts posted across the interweb.

ESPN Draft Day Predictor and Simulator

https://www.espnsportsanalytics.com/nfl-draft/

https://espnsportsanalytics.com/nfl-sim

They snuck this one in under the wire, but last week, ESPN rolled out a pair of nice tools. The mock draft simulator isn’t novel necessarily, but the draft probability tool is and it is great (it powers the logic of the simulator - but there are several other inputs). The draft day predictor tool does a really nice job of giving the distribution of probabilities for when a player will be taken and the chances they are available at any particular pick.

NFL Trade Chart Calculator

https://rbsdm.com/stats/trade-calculator-app/

We all are probably familiar with any of the half dozen of trade value charts for draft picks. Teams use them, either just the classic Jimmy Johnson chart or a combination of many of the publicly available ones.

Joseph Hefner has a nice tool he launched on Monday that aggregates six different trade value calculators with a lot of inputs to where you can look at prior trades or calculate them as they happen on Thursday/Friday/Saturday.

The 33rd Team Draft Stats Tool

https://www.the33rdteam.com/nfl-draft/2023/combine-stats/

Really love how 33rd Team has rolled out a lot of stuff over the past few months or so. This new tool (which is pretty new I believe since I literally saw it for the first time today when I started putting this piece together) gives you sortable leaderboards for draft prospects, including advance stats. The SIS Draft Board (linked below) has some of this data, but the 33rd Team tool (which is based of SIS data) expands it a bit.

Consensus Big Boards

https://www.profootballnetwork.com/2023-nfl-draft-industry-consensus-big-board/

https://www.jacklich10.xyz/shiny/consensus_bb/

https://www.nflmockdraftdatabase.com/big-boards/2023/consensus-big-board-2023

Another wisdom of the crowd tool, there are two “main” aggregate big boards out there, one by Arif Hasan, one by Jack Lichtenstein, and another by the folks at Mock Draft Database. Arif has been doing his for about a decade now and Jack has data going back about as far back as that too.

OverTheCap Trade Calculator

https://overthecap.com/trade-calculator

I don’t mean to call out just one specific trade chart source, but I’ll always try to shout out OTC when I can given that they are a godsend for football information beyond just contract data (which they are also the GOAT at).

Their trade calculator is easy to use and has all the team picks pre-loaded, plus you have the ability to define which position the pick is being used to select if you’d like.

Mockdraftable

https://www.mockdraftable.com/

Maybe not quite a pure draft analysis tool, but a great resource to look at combine results and how a player compares to past players at his positional group or genre.