NFL NextGen Stats team unveils new draft website

Many NFL fans spend the weeks leading up to the draft poring over predictions to try to figure out which players their favorite teams are most likely to select.

Those mock drafts quickly become obsolete once the actual draft begins with some projected targets inevitably coming off the board before a team even makes its pick.

That was the motivation for the NFL’s NextGen Stats team to create a new draft site that adapts seamlessly with each move made before or during the draft. The site takes elements from the old draft preview magazines that presented easily digestible information.

“The draft magazine was so efficient at displaying information in a easy to digest way,” said Mike Band, the senior manager for research and analytics at NFL NextGen Stats. “In a lot of ways as we’ve optimized for mobile experiences, we’ve lost that art of a dashboard-like experience. That was the impetus for this project, creating a digital magazine that could be updated live and evolve in a dynamic way and hopefully have really fun and engaging live features.”

The NFL Draft IQ site launched earlier this month to preview the draft. It was designed to be the ideal second screen during the draft starting Thursday night. The site includes team-by-team pages that list each team’s picks in the next two drafts, moves they had made in the offseason, potential draft targets for each day of the draft, a mock draft tracker and historic tendencies for each general manager.

The site was created in less than three weeks with help from Amazon QuickSight, building on the work the NextGen Stats team did in creating Combine IQ, which provided context and comparisons to the loads of data produced at the annual scouting combine.

Band has been posting potential first-round targets for teams for the past six years and has had a high rate with about three-quarters of the teams taking one of his potential targets.

That work used from looking at team needs, draft history, mock drafts, pre-draft meetings and other information leads to the potential targets on the Draft IQ site for each team for each day. Those will be updated throughout the draft based on who’s left on the board and what needs have been met.

“It’s a fun exercise to try to match these teams to players across different pre-draft interests, team needs,” Band said. “A lot of teams have a lot of smoke screens, so you almost have to read between the lines in a lot ways.”

The team pages include tendencies for general managers, including how often they have traded up or down, whether they target certain positions in the prime rounds and if the GM has had patterns based on size, age or other attributes when picking players.

For example, Houston’s Nick Caserio has used 31 of his 32 picks on players who came out of power conferences. The Bengals also tend to go that direction with all 22 of their picks in the first two rounds since 2014 coming from power conference schools.

Philadelphia’s Howie Roseman has used 10 of his 13 first-round picks when running the draft on the trenches, while Detroit’s Brad Holmes’ picks have the highest average athleticism score from NGS since he took over in 2021.

“If you want to know who the last few picks were you can go to the draft tracker on NFL(dot)com,” Band said. “But if you want to go deeper into every pick as it’s happening and trying to anticipate the next pick and you want to sound smart at an NFL draft party and tip the pick without actually talking to Ian Rapoport, then follow along with Draft IQ.”

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