With the draft approaching, the cult of the General Manager is only growing as fans and detractors pass judgement on their respective GMs.

General Managers have grown from general obscurity to headline grabbers, as having a talented GM has become increasingly considered one of the foundations for a teams’ long term success. However, despite the analytic revolution that has occurred both in journalism and in NFL front offices with regards to the sport, there are few statistics that rate a GM, mostly because they are hard to quantify. GMs are involved in several activities for an NFL team, from player signings to contract renegotiation, however the one activity that makes or breaks a GMs worth in the public eye is the draft. Not only is it such a prominent action in the mind of the public, it is also one that is subject to a wide range of psychological fallacies. Fans remember the steal in the 5th round that a GM was able to find, but they also forget the 3rd and 4th round players that faded into general obscurity. Analytic sites regard the draft as a crap shoot, while also praising smart picks. Can a GM consistently beat the market and identify prime prospects? Or are they doomed to stockpiling picks and just rolling the dice as often as possible? Let’s find out.

First off there is a bit of an obvious issue that throws off our analysis. A good or great GM should be picking pretty late in the draft, as his team performed well during the season, while a bad GM should be picking pretty early assuming everything else is held constant. Thus a GM who drafts well and improves his team’s success as a result would be pushed further and further back in the draft. So it’s not enough to just take the value of a GM’s pick, but also it should be compared to the predicted value of that pick.

In order to predict the value of a pick, Pro Football Reference’s approximate value statistic was utilized to create a catalog of each player’s performance in the five years since he was drafted, since after their rookie contract these players should be judged based upon their new and more expensive contracts, for all drafts between 1980 to 2010. The results are below:

Well that is clearly a mess. It does not seem that most general manager have a clue what they’re doing or it is impossible to predict a prospects result, or maybe a bit of both. In order to go further, I used a non-parametric function to fit the data in order to generate a predicted value per pick, and you can see the fit below:

This prediction values first and second round picks significantly higher, though not as high as the famed Jimmy Johnson chart of draft pick values. The reasoning is clear, there is not only a higher average, but a smaller risk among these picks because very few players generate 0 approximate value, most likely because risk averse GMs avoid boom or bust picks early in the draft. Using these predicted values, and the General Manager tenures from Pro-Football Reference, I analyzed the difference between the predicted and actual approximate value for every pick for every General Manager. Then in order to exclude those who simply had one lucky draft, I filtered for General Managers who drafted atleast 3 times and generated the following top 10:

Some of these defy conventional assumptions, yet peering a bit closer it starts to make sense. The Jets were perpetual over performers given their quarterback nightmares, and the strong drafting of Bradway and Tannenbaum may have been the reason behind it. Ted Thompson has recieved a lot of praise in constructing the juggernaut of Green Bay’s offense, though Accorsi has been generally disregarded. Conventional top General Managers such as Ozzie Newsome (11th among those with 3 or more drafts) and Bill Belichick (23rd) fell outside of the top 10 with obscure names such as Rick Smith surpassing them. Most Impressive is AJ Smith and Bill Polian who beat the expectation of each pick by nearly four points. That’s an additional 2014 Riley Cooper or Ha Ha Clinton-Dix per pick. In other words they out performed each pick by the equivalent of additional role player. Pretty impressive considering over all their picks they essentially added an additional Peyton Manning or Jerry Rice of over performance, thus helping give their teams a strong competitive edge. In a follow up post, I will go into detail in analyzing these top 10 General Managers, and see whether statistically it can be said with confidence they beat the average, or whether they just counted on a few hail marys to pad their stats.

Now onto the worst ten General Managers, where conventional wisdom holds more sway: among the bottom 10 are the infamous Al Davis, a Houston GM, a Detroit GM, a Buffalo GM, and a Tampa Bay GM.

The worst under-performer was Jay Zygmunt who essentially cost the Rams a role player with every pick, and was unsurprisingly fired after only three seasons. Al Davis was the longest tenured of these under-performers, unsurprising given the fact that he was also the owner.

The fact remains that we have a lot of work to do in how we rate general managers. It is clear that they are often overshadowed by coaches, or pulled down by them, and rarely get to see the fruits of their labor: the average general manager in the aughts was around for only 4 years, less than the typical rookie contract. Thus torn between a win now or be fired mode, general managers sometimes have to make less than ideal choices in free agencies. Not only that, some top performers get the limelight stolen by a boisterous coach. In the next update, I will be analyzing just how these top 10 GMs beat the draft, and whether it was luck or skill. You can find the full ratings of General Managers below:

Note:Thanks to football reference for all the data!