NFL Draft Day Party Hangover Live Feed Prologue

After two and a half months of mock drafts, player and position rankings, scouting-combine analysis, college pro days and just plain anticipation, the 2024 NFL Player Selection Meeting is afoot. In a matter of minutes, the din of boos will be raised when Roger Goodell walks upon the draft stage in Detroit for the first time.

Normally a draft analysis would concern draft needs for the teams taking college players and whether the players actually taken fulfill such needs. But I'm not like other draft analysts. Rather, I've committed to taking a page from the great college football writer and prognosticator Phil Steele, who has documented a phenomenon he has referred to as Draft Day Party Hangover since 1998.

The system he adopted assesses the immediate impacts the draft has had on college teams by assigning a point value to each pick, depending on the round in which he was taken. Every first-round pick has a value of seven points, but this drops to five points for second-round selections. Each of the next four rounds decreases the per-pick value by one point, but all sixth- and seventh-round picks are one point each, owing to the lack of significant difference in prospect value at that stage of the event.

What you see here is part of my running table of last year's draft according to Steele's metric. To "achieve" Draft Day Party Hangover, a school must rack up a dozen points' worth of draft picks and at least match its total points from the year before in any given year. The point of the exercise is that, although schools can benefit in terms of recruiting, NIL fundraising and transfer-portal abjuration from having their football programs' players selected in the draft, heavy losses to the draft can create issues in the short term.

As for me, I have been tracking the phenomenon since 2011 in my own right. My data first went public in 2013 on Facebook, but I switched to Twitter these last two years before the Devilish Rake became (I hope) the permanent home of my annual live feed this year.

I mentioned my running table, which is excerpted above. Each round is numbered 1 through 7 with the points accrued in each round noted to help me recall which school produced how many picks in each round of a given draft. The second-last column includes the total points for each school represented in that year's draft. The last is marked "DDPH," which is the initialism for the condition described in this live feed. Each school that produced twelve or more points' worth of draft picks is marked with either an X or an asterisk. If it's an asterisk, it means that the school had at least a dozen points but fewer than last year. If it's an X, that's at least as many points as last year and, therefore, a hangover case.

Got all that? Good! When you understand, do proceed to the next post, which is the live feed itself.

Edward the Scop