ROUNDS AND LONGEVITY: ANOTHER LOOK AT NFL CAREER LENGTH
In the twelve year span from 1995-2007, about 2,600 players that heard their names called in the NFL Draft have seen the field on Sunday somewhere and for some length of time. The question we are examining in this particular work is, “How long?”
The answer may not shock many people - it might very well depend on where you were picked in the draft. We know from anecdotal evidence that the typical NFL career is on the short side, perhaps even fleeting. Indeed, in the sample I used – 1995-2007 – regardless of round, you could expect to spend 5.21 years in the NFL on average with a standard deviation of about three years. Here’s the broad distribution of players by career length:
The distribution is very, very skewed – in a sample of 2,624 players, 30.7% of them played 8 or more years, and only 12.8% of them played 10 or more years. Of more note, 49.3% of those players played five years or fewer, so you can see where that particular average comes from. Speaking of average career length, it began to take a tumble towards the end of the studied period.
Let me change this up for a moment and explain why I used 1995-2007 as a time frame. The primary reason is that I wanted to use a time period where there would not be very many careers still in progress. Using data too close to the present would drag down the averages for the first few rounds and probably do little to the remaining rounds. Also, it is a relatively recent timeframe, so the game was in a state at least close to what it is at the moment.
Bearing that in mind now, let’s look at average length of service by round overall:
Here, you’ll note the bars which show plus or minus one standard deviation. Essentially, the average career length of a first round pick is pretty atypical in the NFL, and you can see this tumble rather nicely to the also atypically brief career of a seventh round pick. The line crosses the average career length between the 3rd and 4th rounds, so basically your chances for a career of some length are greater in the first three rounds. That shouldn’t surprise you, but the numbers back it up.
Here’s the same data, but broken out by round and year. It will appear cluttered at the bottom (which you should expect as the separation decreases rapidly in later rounds), but you’ll note that the first and second rounds more or less fly high above the others.
Another way to look at this is to see the individual rounds distributed by length of service and player counts so that you can see the profile of each round in this time period. The first and second rounds are fairly normal, although they both have some multimodal moments:
The third round’s profile is very different, heavily skewed towards briefer careers:
The fourth through seventh rounds therefore should not be surprising:
So, we can see in this sampling that your draft round definitely can be a factor in how long you manage to stay in the league. In another part of this particular set of diaries, we will zoom in and look at the first two rounds and see if there is a potential impact from one’s spot in the draft order and later on we will tackle this by position to examine tendencies by round.
Oh, and in case you're ever confused...
