Where ESPN’s NFL Draft Model Thinks Your Favorite Player Is Going

The 2020 NFL draft, which begins Thursday, is sure to provide a lot of intrigue — and not just because the proceedings will be conducted in a fully virtual fashion for the first time in history. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, prospects’ pro days were canceled, in-person interviews had to be shifted to digital formats, and the final steps of the scouting process were totally upended. That means there could be more uncertainty than ever about who should be picked where and how much confidence general managers can have in their selections.

To help cut through some of that doubt — or at least quantify it — Brian Burke of ESPN’s Stats & Information Group created a predictive tool that combines mock drafts, team needs, scouting assessments and even trade possibilities to generate the odds that each player will be taken with each pick. On a related note, it can also tell you the chances that any given prospect will still be available at a given draft slot, a priceless function for GMs deliberating whether to trade up to snag their preferred player or wait for him to fall into their laps.

Our friends at Stats & Info shared the model with us early; it will be updated again before the start of the draft with the addition of a few final mock drafts. In the meantime, here is a sortable, searchable table featuring all 199 of the players in the early projections, along with their draft-slot projections. Each player has an average draft position — weighted by their likelihood of being taken at each pick — plus their best-case (95th percentile), median (50th percentile) and worst-case (5th percentile) pick outcome, according to the model.

There are many interesting insights within the draft model. Here are its biggest takeaways for the top of the first round:

Joe Burrow is almost certainly going first overall

According to the model, LSU quarterback Joe Burrow has an 87 percent chance of being picked first overall in the draft — which means that, barring some kind of crazy trade, he’s very likely to join the Bengals, who have the No. 1 pick. And if he’s not first, there’s a 12 percent chance that Burrow goes second. So the odds that Burrow is still available by the No. 3 pick, according to the ESPN model, are less than 1 percent:

It makes sense: Burrow is coming off a historic campaign in which he won the Heisman Trophy and led LSU to a national championship. If he also goes No. 1, he would become just the fourth player ever to pull off that trifecta in the same season. He’s the consensus top pick for a reason.

The model is far less sure about where the next QBs will land

The consensus second-ranked QB prospect, Alabama’s Tua Tagovailoa, actually has a 6 percent chance of going first. But he also has a 15 percent chance of falling outside the top five picks, which should tell you about the amount of uncertainty around Tagovailoa’s projection in the model:

The biggest question around Tagovailoa might be whether the Miami Dolphins, who need a quarterback, should trade up from No. 5 to take him early. The model sees only a 33 percent chance that he’ll still be available at No. 5, with the most likely landing spot being Detroit with the No. 3 pick (45 percent). But are the Lions ready to move on from Matthew Stafford? (Maybe they take CB Jeff Okudah instead.) There’s just enough unpredictability to make Tagovailoa’s destination a mystery.

A similar story can be told about the other top QB prospects, Oregon’s Justin Herbert and Utah State’s Jordan Love. According to the model, there’s a 79 percent chance that Herbert will go fifth, sixth or seventh, though there’s some chance he goes as high as second and as low as 12th. (Both of those outlier scenarios have about a 1 percent chance of happening.) Love’s projection has even greater variability; the model thinks there’s a 95 percent chance that he will be picked between Nos. 12 and 40 in the draft.

Ohio State defenders are going to have a top five party

Buckeyes DE Chase Young, who might be the most talented player in this draft class (even if he isn’t picked first), is a virtual lock for a top-three pick, with a 98 percent chance according to the model. It also thinks there’s a 76 percent chance that Young is either the first or second player off the board, though there is just a 5 percent chance he’s taken over Burrow.

His teammate, Okudah, could be drafted nearly as high. The model thinks there’s a 79 percent chance that the All-American corner is taken with either the third or fourth overall pick, with the most likely destination being the New York Giants at No. 4. That means fully half of the top four picks on Thursday could be members of the 2019 Ohio State defense — and those Buckeyes could be half of the four defenders predicted for the top 10, including Clemson LB Isaiah Simmons and Auburn DT Derrick Brown.

It could be another tough draft for running backs

No running back was taken in last year’s draft until the Oakland Raiders took Josh Jacobs at No. 24 overall, snapping a three-year streak of ball-carriers going in the top five. And if the ESPN model is any indicator, this year won’t be a banner year for running backs, either. In terms of average draft position,¹ the top RBs figure to be Georgia’s D’Andre Swift and Wisconsin’s Jonathan Taylor, followed by Ohio State’s J.K. Dobbins and LSU’s Clyde Edwards-Helaire. None is expected to go very high, though — in fact, they all might fall outside the first round:

Suffice to say, those average pick numbers are not encouraging. There’s a 1 percent chance Taylor is taken as high as 16th and a 6 percent chance he goes in the top 20, easily the best chance for any running back in this class. (Dobbins has a 1.6 percent shot at the top 20; Swift’s probability is 0.6 percent.) But it’s likely that the top RBs will have to wait quite a while before their names are called.

It’s anybody’s guess where Xavier McKinney and James Lynch might go

Generally speaking, the model sees a pretty small range of picks for most top prospects. Not everyone is like Burrow, of course — the LSU signal-caller is literally projected to go either first, second or third … and that’s it. But players with mid-first-round talent generally aren’t projected to drop much more than, say, the 35th pick or so, even in their worst-case scenarios.

Alabama safety Xavier McKinney is different. The model thinks McKinney could realistically go 12th or higher (7 percent chance) … or slip to the 53rd pick or lower (5 percent):

Among players projected as likely first-round picks, McKinney has the widest range of potential draft outcomes, reflecting the chance that he slides to the end of the second round (or maybe even beyond) if he doesn’t end up going in the first.

McKinney isn’t alone in his draft uncertainty. Baylor DE James Lynch has an even crazier-looking distribution of potential pick destinations, ranging from the middle of the first round on the high side to the late fourth round on the low side: