The Accountability Index
Every April, everyone's a draft expert. This page keeps score: each analyst's archived pre-draft board, graded against what their ranked players actually became in the NFL — the same standard our own model answers to, and the same one your locked board will.
The ruler: we grade each archived board against what its players actually became across their first four NFL seasons — the rookie deal — position-fairly, so a hit on a guard counts like a hit on a receiver. Analysts need at least two graded classes to be ranked; newer classes slide in as their fourth NFL season completes.
This is the same table, same data, same order as the analyst leaderboard — the canonical version, with filters, team blogs and every analyst's full receipt page. Kiper, Brugler, McShay and the PFF board aren't rankable yet; the leaderboard discloses why.
Rows are ranked by overall grade — foresight 55 percent, top-32 hits 30 percent, bust avoidance 15 percent — so a long, strong record outranks a hot streak in any single column.
| # | Analyst | Outlet type | Classes graded | Foresight | Top-32 hits | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bar | Consensus The average of every public board — the bar any single analyst has to clear. | Benchmark | 5 | +0.50 | 26% | A |
| 1 | ESPN Scouts Inc. | National | 5 | +0.48 | 28% | A |
| 2 | Tankathon staff | Aggregator | 3 | +0.42 | 28% | A |
| 3 | Drafttek staff | Aggregator | 4 | +0.42 | 28% | A |
| 4 | NBC Sports · Thor Nystrom | National | 2 | +0.40 | 27% | A− |
| 5 | CBS Sports · Josh Edwards | National | 2 | +0.35 | 30% | A− |
| 6 | Sporting News · Vinnie Iyer | National | 3 | +0.39 | 26% | A− |
| 7 | Rotoworld · Josh Norris | National | 2 | +0.37 | 27% | A− |
| 8 | The Draft Network · Joe Marino | National | 3 | +0.36 | 27% | B+ |
| 9 | Draft Wire · Luke Easterling | National | 3 | +0.36 | 25% | B+ |
| 10 | Bleacher Report staff | National | 2 | +0.36 | 24% | B+ |
| 11 | Daniel Jeremiah (NFL Network) | Marquee | 5 | +0.32 | 26% | B+ |
| 12 | SB Nation · Dan Kadar | National | 3 | +0.31 | 24% | B |
| 13 | Bleacher Report · Matt Miller | Marquee | 3 | +0.27 | 26% | B |
| 14 | The Draft Network · Kyle Crabbs | National | 3 | +0.30 | 23% | B |
| 15 | The Draft Network staff | National | 2 | +0.29 | 24% | B |
| 16 | theScore staff | National | 2 | +0.20 | 24% | C+ |
| 17 | CBS Sports · Chris Trapasso | National | 4 | +0.17 | 26% | C+ |
How to read this honestly
These are archived public boards — no cherry-picking, no retroactive edits. Foresight measures whether an analyst's ordering predicted rookie-deal value, position-fairly (a hit on a guard counts like a hit on a receiver); it's a rank correlation, where 0 is a coin flip and +0.3 is genuinely strong. Two classes is the minimum to appear; small samples still carry real luck, which is why the class count sits next to every number. Others have graded analysts against outcomes before in one-off studies — this index's job is to do it continuously, on a public ruler, every cycle.
Our own model answers to a harder version of the same question — full-career value across 2017–2024 — on the track record page. Nobody gets to grade the industry without grading themselves first.