2023 NFL Draft Prospects - First charts of the year!

The Super Bowl is done. The confetti has fallen and the drunken parades are over. It’s draft season!

Without further ado, let’s see some charts! These charts are filterable. You can see the values overall, or by conference. It looks best if you maximize the charts using the button on the lower right.

I started getting ranks for the 2023 draft class on August 8, 2021, and the most recent ranks are from February 18, 2023.

The first tab (named Overall Draft Value) gives a geographic representation of where the value in the draft is physically located, separated by state. The number on the state represents the number of prospects in that state, and the shade of green represents the overall draft value, with dark green representing more value than light green or white.

On the second tab of the chart (named Individual Player Variance), it’s a bit confusing until you select one of the individual schools or players, then you can see the individual movement of that player over the time that these rankings have been tabulated. Take a look at Jaxon Smith-Njigba from Ohio State or Tiawan Mullen from Indiana to see how the values can change. You can also select a school, and view all of the school’s prospects at the same time.

The third chart just shows all of the players and all their ranks over time. This chart is a logarithmic scale, since moving 5 spots in the top 10 is a big deal, but moving 5 spots in the top 400 isn’t.

The rough methodology used for the Leagify charts is this: Each prospect is given a point value based on their current rank, which is given regardless of position (“Big Board” style).

Rank values:

• 01 - 10 : 35 points
• 11 - 25 : 30 points
• 26 - 35 : 25 points
• 36 - 59 : 20 points
• 60 - 70 : 15 points
• 71 - 100 : 10 points
• 101 - 120 : 8 points
• 121 - 150 : 7 points
• 151 - 180 : 6 points
• 181 - 250 : 5 points
• 251 - 300 : 2 points
• 301 - 500 : 1 point

These big board rankings came from NFL Mock Draft Database 2023 Consensus Big Board, which started posting 2023 prospect information quite a while ago, and the most current rankings are from February 18. Only the value of the player’s primary position was considered.

The data is scraped, cleaned, and mushed together with a variety of code, which is available here for viewing, if you’re into that sort of thing.