2023 NFL Draft Winners and Losers

Using odds movement to evaluate performance

There are many ways to evaluate a teams performance in the draft. You can see if they filled needs, but of course you have to determine what the teams needs were in the first place. In order to do that properly, you need to be an expert at team building, and it helps if you’ve done it a time or 2 in the past. You can give grades based on player ratings. But that would have personal bias based on your opinion of a player, so you must be an expert talent evaluator with years of scouting experience.

Lots of people claim to be draftniks, but not many people actually have the experience to qualify to give an opinion. Even the so called “experts” are biased in their ratings based on relationships and own player evaluations.

I’m not a draft expert, I couldn’t even tell you who most of the players drafted are. With 2 kids under 6, I don’t have time, so I rely on other avenues. My favorite is odds movement, and I’m going to use the odds for Win Totals, Win Super Bowl, Win Conference Championship and Win Division from before the draft and after the draft to determine who won and lost. To review the odds and look at movement together, I built a dashboard and published to my Tableau Public page. I have screenshots from different parts included throughout, but check out the dashboard and let me know your thoughts.

Regular Season Wins

On the other side Washington and Arizona would be losers as they both saw their win totals move down 1 game, indicating UNDER money. Arizona went from 5.5 to 4.5 and Washington moved from 7.5 to 6.5.

Super Bowl

Wow, 13 teams being negatively impacted by draft results, that’s a bit shocking to me. Here are the list of teams:

The price movement varies by team, but a few stand out. Las Vegas has the largest negative price move, going from 4,000 to 6,500. They are joined by AFC West foe Denver, who saw a movement from 2,500 to 4,000. The 4,000 seems more realistic to me, I’m not sure they should have been tied for 8th best odds in the league like they were before the draft, so glad to see the market agree with me.

Conference Championship

The losers list is quite long, comprising 15 teams:

The biggest losers had price movement of 1,000 points: Indianapolis (8,000 to 9,000), LA Rams (2,500 to 3,500) and Washington (2,500 to 3,500). That was followed by Green Bay who had an 800 point move from 2,200 to 3,000.

Division Winner

I thought nearly every team would see some kind of movement, simply because of how small the market is for each division. With a 25% chance to win, a price move on 1 team, should impact the value of each other team. This is clearly reflected in the movement between 3/14 and 4/21, with only New England remaining constant.

The biggest winner was Houston, who saw a 300 point improvement from 1,000 to 700. Pittsburgh is next with a 100 point move from 500 to 400, but all other winners saw movement of 30 points or less. The biggest loser was Arizona with a 500 point move from 2,000 to 2,500. As if 2,500 odds weren’t hard enough, seems like AZ is already being counted out by most. Next biggest was Tampa Bay by 200 (700 to 900), LA Rams by 125 (475 to 600) and Minnesota by 100 (250 to 350).

Overall Winners

Based on all of the movements above, I would have to say that Houston is the biggest winner of the draft. I find it hard to believe they are since their price did not change in the Super Bowl or Conference markets. They saw upticks in the Division, and of course only team with a positive win total move. The positive win total move is what swayed me to crown them the victors. With only 3 teams seeing a real change in market price, I put a bit more weight on this result. However, I’m still trying to figure out if the win total and division movement on Houston isn’t necessarily a result of what that team did, but more of the market disliking what the other 3 teams in that division did in the draft.

Overall Losers

I think a lot of teams draft results were reflected negatively in the market place. It’s easy to point to a few teams like Arizona and Green Bay based on market changes, but there are 2 other teams that I believe are the biggest drafter losers: Washington and Cincinnati. Cincinnati saw price improvement in 3 of the 4 markets reviewed before the draft, but after the draft they lost all that value and more. Cincinnati saw Super Bowl odds move from 900 to 850 to 1,100; Conference odds move from 475 to 450 to 500 and division odds move 125 to 120 to 130. If you liked Cincinnati before, I hope you waited and take advantage of the better prices now.

Washington has had price movement all over the place in all 4 markets so far this year. Before the draft, Washington saw price improvement in the Super Bowl (7,000 to 6,000) and Conference (3,000 to 2,500). But they also had negative movement in division price going from 800 to 900. After the draft they had negative price moves in 3 of 4 markets: Win Total (7.5 to 6.5), Super Bowl (6,000 to 6,500) and Conference (2,500 to 3,500). It doesn’t get much worse than that, clearly the new ownership group in Washington has their work cut out for them.