11 draft classes, held out and graded.
Every class was kept out of training, then scored against the real NFL draft and the first four seasons of pro production — the rookie-contract window, so every class is graded on the same ruler and recent classes count. (Full careers get their say on the re-grade pages.) Draftanomics's board grades out ahead of the analyst consensus and a step shy of NFL war rooms — win, lose, or draw against the league, you see every hit and every whiff below. The sample, everywhere on this page: 11 draft classes graded, 5 with complete four-year windows.
The picks the model nailed and the ones it whiffed on are named — no cherry-picking.
Class strength →The Model Beats the Room, Not the War Rooms
Over the 2018-2022 window, Draftanomics' Career Score correlated at 0.51 with actual career value — well clear of the 0.38 posted by analyst consensus. NFL war rooms still win the argument at 0.60, and that gap makes sense: they've got medicals and private workouts no public model touches. The real story isn't that Draftanomics is infallible. It's that public consensus, the thing most fans anchor to, is the weakest predictor of the three. That's the gap worth arguing about.
Written by our models from the live board; every name and number checked