Wide Left

2 weeks ago | wideleft.football | Arif Hasan

In the days following the draft, I find my mentions light up with people referencing my work in the context of undrafted free agents, which is really neat to see. But until last year, I hadn’t really tested the big board against undrafted free agency. UDFAs can be some of the most impactful players on the team; teams really aren’t complete without a good complement of those players and — because there are so many more of them in camp — they are often large proportions of every NFL roster.

2 weeks ago | wideleft.football | Arif Hasan

With the conclusion of the NFL draft, we have the ability to assess how teams added rookies to their roster using all of the information we have available to us. No approach is perfect, including this one, but we have the opportunity to leverage the collective wisdom of draft analysts to see which teams might have done the most to position themselves for success. If you want to skip 4,000 words of exploration on this topic, click here to jump down to the grades.

2 weeks ago | wideleft.football | Arif Hasan

Shedeur Sanders is sliding. The most well-known quarterback prospect in this year’s draft – perhaps in the past several drafts – hasn’t heard his name called from the NFL podium in two days, having heard five quarterbacks and one other player named Sanders called before him. That’s despite having been ranked by outside analysts as the 22nd-best player in the draft.

2 weeks ago | wideleft.football | Arif Hasan

For those following the Consensus Big Board project, Day 2 is arguably as exciting as Day 1, as teams pounce on the astounding value left on the board at the top of the second round. Players who “fell” in the draft from their original big board position are seen as astounding finds – but is that really all that useful? The headlines of draft classes are built on the first round, but the strength of classes are created in the second and third rounds.

3 weeks ago | wideleft.football | Arif Hasan

With data from 87 analysts, we can use our survey of draft media to do more than just figure out what the average belief of the draft community is on a player – it can tell us which players are more polarizing and what category of analyst we’re looking at. The polarity of players – already explored in a previous piece – is easy to understand. Players who generate more variance in their rankings are more divisive within the community. That second category, however, isn’t quite as intuitive.