Washington Football Team: Evaluating draft value by position

Conclusions

Size matters. Apart from quarterback, quality offensive tackles and defensive linemen tend to come early.

Defense matters. Only about 15 percent of the All-Rookie defenders were selected after the second round. By contrast, more than 28 percent of the All-Rookie offensive players, including four from 2020, were selected after the second round.

Draft your tackles early and wait on interior linemen. No big surprise there.

The fact that, despite ranking behind offensive tackles, the quarterback position still has a very high value, would seem to contradict the way I began this piece. It would appear, based on these numbers, that you do have to invest a high draft pick in order to secure a quality quarterback.

So, just a few more details. Two of those seven QBs, Teddy Bridgewater and Jameis Winston, are no longer with the team that drafted them. Another, Dak Prescott, was a forth-round pick. In 2019, Pro Football Focus, which chooses an All-Rookie Team based on their own performance analytics, opted for sixth-round pick Gardner Minshew over PFWA’s selection Kyler Murray.

So you can look at these numbers in a lot of different ways. But my main takeaway is that drafting a quarterback in Round 1 is not foolproof. Even guys like Bridgewater and Winston, who were great as rookies, didn’t quite pan out. And they’re among the most successful first-round QB choices of the past seven years. And with the unprecedented movement of quality quarterbacks in recent years, the draft is not the only game in town.

In case you’re interested, the Washington Football Team drafted four of the 154 players to have been made All-Rookie since 2014. That’s just below average, average being about five. Chase Young, Daron Payne, and Brandon Scherff were all first-round picks, while Terry McLaurin was a third-rounder.

Two other All-Rookie selections played for Washington in 2020. They comprised half of Washington’s opening day secondary – Ronald Darby and Landon Collins.

So, with all that said, I hereby offer the following conditional wager to the chairman of the “Bring Mac to DC” committee, Jacob Camenker: Should the Washington Football Team pick Alabama QB Mac Jones in the first round of the 2021 draft, I predict he will not be on Washington’s roster come Opening Day of the 2026 season. Terms of the wager TBD.