How the NFL draft works, in a 90-second read

Plus a few bonus ideas on ways it could work, if it ever changed.

Apr 27, 2017, 9:00 PM UTC

Photo by Jon Durr/Getty Images

The NFL draft’s basic rules aren’t too complex.

Non-playoff teams are ranked in reverse order of win percentage, with the worst team getting the No. 1 pick.
Playoff teams are ranked in reverse order of their postseason progress, with the Super Bowl champ picking No. 32.
Ties are broken based on (in order): opponent winning percentage, records against various kinds of common opponents, and a coin flip. When there’s a coin flip, the tied teams alternate in order from round to round.
That’s the first round’s order.
That order repeats for six more rounds over two more days, with a few “compensatory picks” added onto later rounds to make up for certain free agency losses.
Teams have 10 minutes to make first-round picks, seven minutes in the second, and five each from there on out. Missing a pick means the next team gets to go, but you can still make yours up.
Commissioner Roger Goodell announces first-round picks while being booed by fans. Other people announce later rounds while being more and more ignored.
Teams can and do trade current picks, future picks, and players. The dumb ones give Bill Belichick stuff.
Drafted players basically already have most of their contract details locked in already, depending on their pick numbers.
After the draft, teams and undrafted players scramble to link up with each other in a free-for-all.

It fits the NFL’s parity-first goal, even though bad teams often stay bad and good teams often stay good, and it’s the model we typically think of when we think of sports drafts.

Based on that, the first two rounds for 2017 look like this:

First round	Team	Second round	Team

90-second read time is up!

But the draft format the NFL uses is not the only kind of draft, so let’s keep chatting.

What if the NFL used a system like the NBA’s?

A single player can’t change an NFL team as much as a No. 1 prospect can in basketball, because of football’s higher number of players on the field and the fact that even a top QB will only play half a game. Football’s short, 16-game season also makes tanking — the art of gainfully losing — much less of a thing, since two months of Browns’ losses are still only eight games.

But if the NFL were to use the NBA’s model, which gives each non-playoff team a record-adjusted chance to win the No. 1 pick, it’d turn out something like this, once you adjust for the NFL’s greater number of non-playoff teams:

Team	Chances for No. 1 pick

Maybe the NFL should work more like your fantasy football league.

A snake draft would slightly even out the extremes of each round, in case one team’s only picking early because of a big injury the prior season, or one team’s only picking late because it won a weak division.

It’d also mean annual comedy as GMs spend all day Friday offering Belichick their right arms for the chance to be the second day’s first pick!

First round	Team	Second rond	Team

We could also kill the NFL draft entirely.

That’d deprive the league of a three-day TV program, so for that reason alone, it ain’t happening. But a lot of Tom Ziller’s points about getting rid of the NBA draft translate just fine:

[If we get rid of the draft], there is no longer a benefit to losing. Getting top rookies is about managing your salary cap sheet and creating an environment where young players want to play. You no longer attract the young elites by being terrible and getting lucky in a drawing. This system now rewards competence.
It allows comprehensive team-building in July. Rookie additions would be made in concert with other player movement decisions. This again will bolster well-managed, deliberate teams. Right now, teams draft and trade players in late June and only then deal with free agents (their own and otherwise) in July. Teams would be better-suited to build their teams in a unified period.
It gives players the choice on where to play. This will definitely hurt incompetent teams. Good! Get more competent so you can attract better players.
It gives teams the choice on what to pay less productive, younger players. The current rookie salary scale is rigid. The No. 1 pick in a really good draft makes roughly the same as the No. 1 pick in a really bad draft. Some years come with multiple players worthy of the No. 1 pick’s higher salary. Most years don’t. Contracts should reflect talent instead of an arbitrary ladder based on the order in which players are picked by teams.

Open-season recruiting works mostly fine in college football, if you’re one of the top 15 or so powers. In the NFL, everyone would have the same money to spend, though.