At Hurling People Now we watch a lot of sport. A lot of it. What we don’t watch a lot of, however, is top level under-18 football. While we love a good bit of local footy, we have neither the time, the money, or the interest to travel 600km to see the nations’ best juniors.

What we do have is an idea and a spreadsheet.

As fevered followers of US sports, we have seen the idea of the “Consensus Mock Draft” crop up now and then. It’s a format that combines multiple mock/phantom drafts to produce a result based on players’ average draft positions across the included drafts. The Consensus Mock Draft eliminates much of the biases involved in assessing talent by assembling a wider pool of knowledge, and attempts to mitigate any outliers in the data.

A Consensus Mock Draft, being an average of predicted draft positions, doesn’t subjectively adjust the dataset for club needs, or for protection against the “go-home” factor. It still factors them in, inasmuch as our pool of phantom drafters value those things when they predict where each player will be drafted. We at HPN haven’t extensively researched the extent to which clubs actually ignore the best available talent and reach for players based on other criteria, however we suspect it plays a small effect at best.

Put simply, the Consensus Phantom Draft is an objective analysis of relatively subjective data; and it pretends to be nothing else.

BEHOLD THE HPN 2015 CONSENSUS PHANTOM DRAFT.

We’ve compiled some of the more prominent Phantom Drafts for 2015, and calculated the results from them. The Consensus Phantom Draft will look at the first two rounds only, as after that the data becomes a little bit funky due to speculative choices, rookie promotions, passed picks, and the like. The drafts we have used are (follow the links to see their drafts):

Paige Cardona (Bound For Glory)

Knightmare (Big Footy)

Jay Clark and Sam Landsberger (Herald Sun)

/u/pizza_of_death (/r/afl subreddit)

Brett Anderson (Inside Football/SEN)

Josh Poulter (FootyExtra)

We’re starting out with a smaller first pool, and intend to expand over time. We hope to run at least 2 or 3 updates as more come in, such as an AFL.com.au phantom draft and Emma Quayle’s from The Age. We are deliberately not including each of their individual selections in this post, as we feel that you should visit their websites (and drive their traffic). Or; we don’t want to be leeches.

If there are any that you think we’ve missed that should be here, email us at: hurlingpeoplenow [at] gmail [dot] com or let us know on twitter at @hurlingpeople

Round 1 Club Player Consensus pick 1 St Kilda Christian Petracca 1.0 2 Melbourne Angus Brayshaw 2.2 3 Melbourne Patrick McCartin 2.8 4 Greater Western Sydney Jayden Laverde 4.7 5 Collingwood Jake Lever 6.7 6 Greater Western Sydney Peter Wright 7.7 7 Greater Western Sydney Jarrod Pickett 8.7 8 Gold Coast Jordan De Goey 9.5 9 Collingwood Darcy Moore 9.0 10 Geelong Hugh Goddard 10.2 11 West Coast Paul Ahern 11.2 12 Richmond Lachie Weller 11.3 13 Fremantle Sam Durdin 11.8 14 Adelaide Liam Duggan 13.5 15 Gold Coast Kyle Langford 14.3 16 North Melbourne Nakia Cockatoo 17.0 17 Essendon Caleb Marchbank 17.6 18 Sydney Isaac Heeney 18.0 19 Carlton Tom Lamb 18.3 20 Essendon Corey Ellis 19.2 21 St Kilda Jarrod Garlett 21.7 Round 2 Club Player Consensus pick 22 St Kilda Reece McKenzie 22.2 23 Greater Western Sydney Connor Blakely 25.8 24 Greater Western Sydney Jack Steele 24.0 25 North Melbourne Connor Menadue 26.4 26 Western Bulldogs Ed Vickers-Willis 26.4 27 Western Bulldogs Brayden Maynard 27.4 28 Carlton Oscar McDonald 28.6 29 Gold Coast Alex Neal-Bullen 30.2 30 Collingwood Damien Cavka 31.6 31 Hawthorn Touk Miller 32.6 32 West Coast Clem Smith 33.4 33 Richmond Dillon Viojo-Rainbow 36.8 34 Fremantle Tyler Keitel 38.2 35 Adelaide Harrison Wigg 40.8 36 North Melbourne Jackson Nelson 41.8 37 Sydney Daniel McKenzie 45.0 38 Sydney Jack Hiscox 38.0 39 Western Bulldogs Toby McLean 46.2 40 Melbourne Dean Gore 47.2

Two small bits of methodology: Undrafted players were assigned draft pick 80 for the purpose of our weighted average. This only starts having any impact in the late second round. Second, Josh Poulter told us on Twitter he somehow omitted two players he intends to be in the draft, so we’ve left them out of the average rather than assigning pick 80. We’ll plug in his updated draft once it’s published.

Top 3 Consensus

All six of the drafts in our current sample have the top three picks being Petracca, Brayshaw and McCartin. All of the evaluators see St Kilda picking Petracca first, then have Melbourne picking Brayshaw and McCartin mostly in that order.

What to do with Peter Wright

Of the first round picks in the Consensus Phantom, only one player has a greater variance than Peter Wright. To most talent evaluators, Wright seems to define the crucial question of potential vs current ability. The earlier Phantom Drafts in our pool have Wright going inside the first 5 picks, whereas the later drafts, have him sliding outside of the top 10. Knightmare’s rolling updates recently dropped Wright to 10th. This would tend to indicate that Wright’s stock is falling, but for now the Consensus Phantom has him going at pick 6.

The Rising Fortunes of Jordan De Goey

The only player with wilder predictions than Wright is Jordan De Goey, who has been ranked as high as pick 4, and as low as pick 17. His selection seems to divide draft watchers, and will be one to watch over the next period.

Conformity, McKenzie and Viojo-Rainbow

The two most uniform selections across the board, outside of the top 10, are that of Reece McKenzie and Dillon Viojo-Rainbow (who also has the inside running on the “Best Name In The Draft Class Award”). All five mock drafts have picked DVR between picks 35 and 39, and McKenzie has fallen between picks 20 and 25.

Reaching for Weller

Half of our six drafts have the Queenslander Lachie Weller going to Gold Coast at pick 8. The other half have him at 11, 16, and 17. Clearly our phantom drafters are split on whether the Suns will reach for the local boy, and it would appear this is a good test for how much recruiters are influenced by fear of the “go home” factor. Consensus splits the difference and currently has Weller going to the Tigers at pick 12.