Every year the podcast hosts do an amazing job of trawling through hours of tape. Providing a valuable resource whether you use it as a starting point for your own scouting, or like me your go to guide to this year’s draft class.
Over the years there has been an ever evolving (sometimes contentious) system of draft grading systems. Ranging from stars of varying colour, various definitions of in/out, and combinations of both. For the 2024 class this was consolidated into a system of numbers with a 5-point ordinal scale ranging from -2 “Avoid” through to +2 “Draft at all costs” (table 1). As a fully paid-up nerd, the prospect of numbers for each prospect was immediately exciting. Get these into a CSV file and off I go, time to go full PFF on the UKSP prospect grades.
Table 1. UKSP draft Grading system
2 | Draft at all costs (Vonte Mack) |
1 | Priority Target |
0 | At Value |
-1 | Falling Target |
-2 | Avoid |
What follows are a series of plots which may (or may not) help with following this year’s draft. Want to know how the hosts rated a prospect without searching a 3+ hour podcast? See plots 3 onwards.
But first plots 1 and 2 give a general overview of what the hosts thought of this year's class. There are a couple of take-home messages.
Plot 1 shows the average grade given by each host for all prospects. We can see that Mark is might higher on the class than the other hosts.
If we look at plot 2 we can see the same broken down by position group.
All hosts are high on the wide receiver group, this is widely reported to be a deep WR class so that tallies. But maybe players who make highlight reel plays get graded higher in general? However, we do not see this at running back which was rated low-ish by all hosts. What stands out is how high Mark is on the interior offensive line (good considering we need one or two this year), in contrast to Ketts who was a bit “meh” on the o-line prospects. Gav was very high on Edge (like Mark for IOL) his average grade was ~0.7, meaning the class averages a priority target across the board. Does this mean we can’t afford to miss out on this edge group regardless of need? Gav also hated the linebackers, contrasting with Ketts and Mark.
After these there is a plot with the consensus podcast grade for each prospect, broken down by position group.
The yellow square is the consensus (average) grade for all hosts for each prospect, ordered from best to worst. There is also a thumbnail for each host to denote their individual grade (Ran is an NFL symbol the rest I used their X/Twitter thumbnail). For those that are interested this was all done in R with a range of “Tidyverse” packages like “dplyr”, “ggplot2”, “forcats”, happy to make the code available.
Hopefully this is of some interest. Enjoy the draft, I will be back afterwards with some analysis of how each host rated each team's draft.
GO Steelers
