Forecasting for the 2024 NFL Draft: Version 1.0 (Fantasy Football)

After Patrick Mahomes pressed copy and paste from last year winning yet another Super Bowl, it is officially time to turn our gaze elsewhere in the NFL circles.

There is so much hope brimming around the NFL Draft at this time of the year. It’s wild that an event where people literally read names from queue cards is one of the most-watched TV events every single year.

However, it is so valuable at this date of the evaluation process that we also come up with a holistic approach for fantasy football purposes.  My job affords me the ability to look at the NFL from a fantasy perspective which (for better or worse) is looking at the NFL as a game. Within a game, the way we strategize and forecast ultimately dictates how successful we might be. Forecasting for the NFL Draft is a slow burn from prospects we’ve been told are “can’t miss” in the fall to highlights posted on social media of certain players to where we arrive at once the calendar turns to mid-February.

Prepare your body as you will be inundated with so many opinions, player comps, and mock drafts that your head might start spinning. This article is meant as an initial vision for the next two months and a chance to stop and notice. Much like a child playing at the beach, it can be hard to gauge the ever-changing tide as you end up 50 yards down from where your family is camped out. Despite the winds and landscape shifting, the entire time you were just having fun in the moment.

Together, let’s make predictions, notice the changes, and hopefully forecast with a mix of humility and gumption.

Forecasting: You See… What Had Happened Was…

Perhaps you need a definition of forecasting that is a bit more nuanced than simply “predicting the future”. Forecasting can be misconstrued if we don’t first identify what it isn’t:

Before you think this is just too philosophical for you to move any further, let’s drill down on a couple of these points before actually forecasting the 2024 NFL Draft.

We need to remove blinders and figure out what is noise.

The easiest place to figure this out is Twitter. And I don’t mean that in a kind way to Twitter. There an overemphasis on sharing opinions that any statistic was thrown your way becomes ammo or an argument. I wrote a few articles in the last two years if you want a deeper dive into the subject:

• How to Sift Through Tweets & Headlines The Week of the NFL Draft
• NFL Draft Headlines & Misinformation: How to Sort Through the Stink

The TLDR version is that you cannot arrive at NFL Draft predictions through simple catchphrases:

• “This team needs this position…”
• “This team likes this player…”
• “Watch for this team to trade up…”
• “This team/GM has never done this so it will not happen…”

We are quick to make up our minds and too slow to change them.

I’ve referenced this quote from the book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction numerous times on the Fantasy Footballers DFS & Betting Podcast. This is true in almost anything in life. We tend to want to hear what we want to hear from the news sources, Twitter accounts, and friends who sound most like us. For players, we love what they could be and fall in love with potential or we close the door too early.

For the NFL Draft, early mock drafts and player comps fill in much of the gray areas of our minds. This is part of the human experience: we want to make meaning and we want the dots to connect in our minds. I saw a comp recently (from a larger site) that likened Washington’s Michael Penix Jr. to… Tim Tebow. Are they both left-handed? Sure. But honestly, beyond that similarity, every pro scout at the NFL level will divert when comparing the throwing motion and Penix’s skillset for the NFL. This rant is for another day but while player comparisons can give definition and fill in some of the empty areas of player evaluation, they also create their own problems amongst a group geared toward quick-hitting analysis and bent on click-baiting numbers. 

I started out this week’s Dynasty Podcast on a bit of a rant on player comps if you want a full discussion.

We Have Much to Learn

The beauty of the NFL Draft is that we have a wealth of data to work with. Beyond just the players and draft capital, this age of sports betting also gives us privileged data on where bettors have been overconfident and what the markets forecasted at different dates in the NFL Draft process. Humans are notoriously overconfident in their estimations¹ and the NFL Draft provides more uncertainty than perhaps most of us are giving credit. Revisionist history is a heck of a drug folks and chances are you (like me) have talked yourself into misremembering so much about the past.

Here are a couple of recent examples of where the field was wildly overconfident sometimes

Malik Willis

The Liberty QB was the betting favorite to go… No. 2 overall in March 2022 with one specific combine throw catapulting him in the betting markets. Before you misremember this even further and think this was just a March thing, Willis’ over/under on draft day was set at 13.5 on DraftKings Sportsbook. The Tennessee Titans selected Willis in the 3rd round, 86th overall and his NFL career has been… less than stellar.

C.J. Stroud

As we discussed on the Dynasty Podcast, Stroud was a favorite of ours last year until the public was introduced to a test they’d never heard of before: the S2 cognitive test. Stroud’s draft stock plummeted in the betting circles only to come back up to being the favorite to go No. 2 overall.

Hang on, am I getting this right?

CJ Stroud “performs poorly” on S2 Test before the draft and creators of the test say “we’ve never had someone grade low and play well.”

Now, CJ dominates and all of a sudden the same people say his results might have been wrong?

C’mon man…

— JJ Watt (@JJWatt) January 20, 2024

Will Levis

What a roller coaster ride for Levis last year. He went from locked-in top-5 pick, to falling out of favor, to the subject of a wild Reddit rumor (boosting his betting odds from +4000 to +400 for No. 1) and finally the betting favorite to go No. 2 overall the day BEFORE the draft. Yes, you read that last part correctly. Levis’s over/under on draft day was set at 4.5. The Tennessee Titans selected Levis in the 2nd round, 33rd overall a year after taking Malik Willis.

Jahmyr Gibbs

After putting up a banner rookie season, the Lions pick at No. 12 overall for the former Alabama RB might seem justified. However, in the betting markets, it was a longer ride than you might’ve realized as Gibbs was not forecasted as a first-round pick for most of February and March. In fact, his expected draft position (per Grinding the Mocks) was sitting at 42.7 on April 10th. His odds of being drafted in the 1st Round of the draft were only +280 (26% implied odds) on DraftKings Sportsbook three days before the NFL Draft (a bet we took in our NFL Draft Props last year). It wasn’t until NFL insider Peter Schrager reported the day before the draft that Gibbs was a Round 1 lock. Things changed from public perception and what we think NFL teams should do to what actually happened.

Making Forecasts

The goal of making forecasts is to see where we’ve come from and notice how the markets adjust over time. Pose a question that gives a simple yes/no response but give your prediction in terms of confidence percentages. One of the hardest parts of participating in mock drafts and online discourse about fantasy football is how most responses are black and white. “This is so obvious! They will definitely not take an RB! No chance they pass on this player!” Betting markets allow us to interpret through the lens of confidence intervals and implied odds which are in themselves percentages. There is room for nuance in our decisions.

I compiled a list of 18 questions in late January and gave my somewhat educated estimation of my confidence at the time. I asked Betz to participate and used a combination of betting markets on DraftKings and FanDuel for the few NFL Draft props available at the time. For instance, you will not find a Trey Benson prop on these major books but in the next month, those will be rolled out in full by the books.

I also utilized Grinding the Mocks as an aggregate to highlight the “expected draft position”. This is not perfect science but mock drafts are a data point worth adding to part of this puzzle. This also allows us to see how much mocks have changed. For instance, after the College Football Final, Michael Penix Jr. was universally seen as a 1st round pick and mocked as high as 10th overall. As we’ve distanced ourselves from Washington’s season, Penix’s draft stock also has seen a major decline. As a prospect, I have questions of my own.

The goal of this exercise is to pose a question, give a response, and see how that confidence % changes over the next two months. Will we get things wrong? Most certainly! The goal isn’t to follow what the Sportsbooks lay out every single time (re-read that last section if you need a refresher) but to adjust based on the information at hand.

Feel free to make your own spreadsheet and respond to these questions knowing that a difference in 1% is significant.

Feel free to reach out on Twitter @kyle_borg if you have any questions.