Managing Expectations: What to expect from the Seahawks new first round pick

In the build up to the 2019 NFL Draft, which starts Thursday, I’ve gone through the Managing Expectations series which looked at what the Seattle Seahawks can expect from the draft picks they hold going forward. This is a continuation of a series that started last spring and looked at the expected outcomes for players drafted by NFL teams based on draft round.

This year I started by looking at how the current front office has fared compared to NFL averages, and then went systematically through each of the four picks the Hawks held in the draft. I started with the team’s first round pick, then moved to its third round pick and its fourth round pick, before finishing things off with a look at the team’s fifth round pick.

At least I thought I had finished things off. Tuesday the Seahawks front office decided to put me back to work when they traded defensive end Frank Clark to the Kansas City Chiefs for a first round pick (1.29) in 2019 and a second round pick in 2020. In any case, there’s a new pick to evaluate, so let’s take a quick look.

As a reminder on the methodology, the sample period looks at a 31 year time frame, so the full sample is 217 players. Now, the 29th pick is another of those that is unique in that while it will be in the first round this year, that was not always the case. During the earlier years of the time period from which I’ve pulled the data, the 29th pick was the first pick of the second round, however, once the Carolina Panthers and the Jacksonville Jaguars joined the league in the mid 90s, the pick moved into the first round. Thus, the 217 picks in the sample are a combination of both first round picks and second round picks.

In what is an interesting trivia factoid, the most productive player in this sample was actually drafted with pick 32, Drew Brees. However, as he was drafted in 2001 when the league had only 31 teams because the Houston Texans had not been born yet, so he was actually the first pick of the second round.

In any case, enough of the trivia, let’s get right to the data. Readers who have been following this series know the data and the charts that I have been using, so I’m not going to waste a lot of time with commentary on these. Thus, the data.

Then the distribution in chart form.

And then the mortality table style chart.

Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the draft to start on Thursday, so that when the Hawks trade down and add picks for Day 2 and Day 3 I have to get back on the laptop to put new tables and charts together.