Gary Smith: On the NFL draft and the benefits of trading down

Trevor Lawrence, the No. 1 pick in last year’s NFL draft, was nearly universally touted as a once-in-a-generation talent, headed straight for the Hall of Fame. His rookie season was, well, a disappointing detour.

He ended the season ranked 32nd among NFL quarterbacks, a smidgen above Zach Wilson, who had been taken second in the draft, and well behind Mac Jones, who was the 15th player taken and finished second in the Offensive Rookie of the Year voting.

Such surprises and disappointments make for lively arguments about the best picks of all time (Tom Brady? Joe Montana? Jim Brown?) and the worst picks ever (Akili Smith? JaMarcus Russell? Ryan Leaf?) There are plenty of candidates for each honor.

Are the scouts, coaches, and general managers who make these terrific and terrible picks ill-informed? No, it is just the nature of the beast.

Whenever there is uncertainty about how intelligent, athletic or otherwise talented a person is or how well they will do a job, those who seem to be the best are usually not as stellar as they seem. They are not bad, just not that extraordinary — closer to the mean.

This regression toward the mean is seen clearly in athletic competitions, such as golf, where there are straightforward numerical measures of success and failure. There is a lot of happenstance in golf: gusts of wind, fortunate and unfortunate bounces, stray leaves, twigs and rocks.

Sometimes a ball will land on a bank and stay there, sometimes, it will roll into a lake or sand trap. Sometimes a ball will whistle through a tree, sometimes it will bounce off a branch.

In a 2016 golf tournament, Phil Mickelson hit an errant drive that bounced off the head of a spectator standing in the rough on one side of the fairway and landed in the rough on the other side of the fairway. Mickelson told the spectator, “If your head was a touch softer, I’d be in the fairway.”

We see a golfer win the Masters tournament, and we are tempted to conclude that he is the best golfer in the world and expect him to win the next tournament. In fact, he is a good golfer, just not necessarily the best golfer. He was one of many golfers who might have won and, this time, was lucky enough to win. In the next tournament, he is likely to perform closer to the mean, while someone else wins.

Golfers take turns winning tournaments, not because their abilities fluctuate from tournament to tournament, but because their luck comes and goes. As the Swedish proverb says, “Luck never gives, it only lends.” This is why, of the 228 golfers who have won at least one of the four men’s major golf championships, 144 (63%) only won once. Another 38 (17%) won twice. Only 29 (13%) golfers have won more than 3 majors.

This regression toward the mean explains the rookie-of-the-year jinx, the Sports Illustrated cover jinx, the Madden NFL Curse, and so many other situations where an extraordinary performance is followed by something more ordinary because the person is not as exceptional as the performance suggests.

In football, it is very hard to predict how college players will perform in the NFL playing against teams that are much better than any team they played against in college. Thus, those football players who were the most outstanding in college are usually closer to average in the NFL.

A study by two business school professors, Cade Massey and Richard Thaler, found that the chances that a drafted player will turn out to be better than the next player drafted in his position (for example, the first quarterback drafted compared to the second quarterback drafted) is only 52%, barely better than a coin flip.Yet, teams pay much more for early draft picks than for later picks.

Even leaving salary aside, teams that trade down (for example giving up the first pick in the draft for the 14th and 15th pick) usually do better than teams that trade up. Often, the 14th pick turns out to be better than the first pick. Usually, the 14th and 15th picks together bring more to a team than does the first pick. Teams are far more likely to celebrate their picks in this Thursday’s NFL draft if they trade down rather than up.

It’s not just athletes. No matter whether we are talking about carpenters, cooks or CEOs, those who seem the best are most likely not as good as they seem. Too bad we can’t trade some of them down.

Gary N. Smith is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College. He is the author of “The AI Delusion,” (Oxford, 2018).

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