Who are the best (and worst) drafting GMs in the NFL?

Mining through the data to find the top draft evaluators

The offseason is a great time to zoom out and take stock of the league from 30,000 feet. It is also a great time to evaluate the long-term effectiveness of teams and their chief decision-makers. Like presidencies, where we analyze the effects of decisions made by NFL general managers in real time, the true consequences of those decisions are not truly understood until years later.

With the benefit of hindsight, our views on NFL front offices can change – to a degree. The most franchise-altering decisions most front offices make are (typically) the players they draft. Drafted players provide the building blocks for franchises, unless, of course, you are the early 2020s Rams.

For all of the fanfare rookies receive, very few actually play much beyond year one. Thirty-five players accounted for 27% of all snaps played by rookies last year. The real impact of a draft class isn’t felt until years three to four, when the class is reaching the maturity of its rookie contract. This is also where the draftees establish their free market value, which creates their second contract APY value.

Given the time horizons involved, we now have an opportunity to take a look back at the first ten years of the slotted rookie wage scale and see which general managers had the most success in the draft from Jaguars general manager James Gladstone’s sophomore year in college through the pandemic season.

While fans can often place unreasonable (four rookies will fix the Niners' long-standing problem fitting the run!) expectations on draft classes, a great class features two or three quality starters with maybe one extra solid contributor. From time to time, there is a class that lacks star power but features a top-to-bottom roster of players who get a second deal.

Over that time frame, 69 personnel executives have run a draft. Well, technically, it’s 70, but I’m grouping Duke Tobin and Mike Brown as one selecting team. To maintain analysis stability, the measurements are of contract APY as a percentage of the cap in the year the deal was signed.

The average draft haul for a season is a cumulative 14.75% APY as a percent of the salary cap on their second contracts. To put that in 2025 perspective, that would be $41.182 million. Funnily enough, that means if a team were to trade away all of their draft picks to select Ja’Marr Chase, they could say they had an average draft. Start the chants: Justice for Mike Ditka!

The average draft pick over this span signed a second deal with an APY at 1.903% of the salary cap. Using this year as context, that would be a $5.31 million salary.

While finding a franchise quarterback does skew results, especially for any GM with fewer than four drafts in the sample size, it doesn’t guarantee a top spot. Two of the top five general managers by average draft haul per season did so without the benefit of a franchise quarterback as a part of their portfolio.

Top Drafting General Managers By Season 2011-2020