CHARTS

2019 XFL Draft Review

The YouTube livestream may have been disappointing, but it’s still football! Let’s find out more about where these players came from.

Below is a chart showing the drafted players based on the state where they played in college.

This chart is filterable. Click a state to see the only those prospects, or check out prospects within a particular conference. Feel free to maximize the charts using the button on the lower right.

Information about the draft:

  • The draft happened in several phases:
    • (Phase 0) Initial QB Allocation (One QB to each team)
    • (Phase 1) Skill Players (QB, RB, TE, WR)
    • (Phase 2) Offensive line (OT, OG, C)
    • (Phase 3) Defensive Front Seven (DT, DE, LB)
    • (Phase 4) Defensive Backs (CB, S)
    • (Phase 5) All Positions (Including P, K, ST)
  • The draft was live-streamed on YouTube on Day 1 and Day 2, with the exception of Phase 5, which was not livestreamed, and information about picks was frustratingly vague compared to the other phases.
  • During the livestream, some teams would yell and clap after announcing their picks, which was annoying when listening to the stream on headphones.

Some thoughts about the data shown here:

  • Everything’s big in Texas, including the number of football prospects. They led the way with 54 players selected from 21 different Texas schools.
  • Florida wasn’t that far behind, with 40 players selected from 8 different Florida schools.
  • The SEC led the way with the most players selected, at 81.
  • 14 players from Division 3 schools were drafted, which is pretty cool.
  • I wasn’t able to find a clean, robust source of NFL data for players that had spent any time with one or more teams, so that information is not included.

Data was obtained from the XFL website, with phases 0-4 having their own draft tracker, and the open phase not having a draft tracker, but having results posted on each team’s page (without any information on the round or pick they were taken).

I collated the draft data and joined up information regarding the location of each school in this repository on GitHub, if you wanted to check out my work. To wrangle the data, I used Google Sheets, Visual Studio Code with Rainbow CSV, OpenRefine, and Tableau Public.

Enjoy!