Nothing gleams like late-round draft gold
Sure, they look nice and all that—especially after they’ve donned your favorite franchise’s new draft-night cap and beamingly posed with the commish—but there’s still something extra special about those diamonds discovered in the rough, those overlooked and under-appreciated late-round selections that turn out to be true unexpected finds.
These are the most rewarding picks and captivating stories of the draft—and the best and brightest of these picks already have achieved legend status:
Super Bowl championships, MVP awards, All-Pro recognition and even Hall of Fame gold jackets—you know the rest of these particular storybook, almost-too-good-to-be-true tales.
Still, also know that the list doesn’t end there. While the Bradys, Davises, and Dents are the undisputed cream of the late-round draft crop, there are a litany of largely ignored and written-off late-round picks who have stunningly blossomed into Pro Bowl players and long-term starters—often eclipsing the accomplishments of more ballyhooed players taken 150–200 picks earlier.
That in mind, the aim here is to answer the follow-up questions:
For the answers, we’ve started with the 2012 draft—giving players at least three seasons to establish their NFL identities—and pored over the previous two decades of drafts to chart the draft choices who have distinguished themselves from the late-round (fifth round and later) draft pack. To qualify as late-round standout, a draft pick has had to either: a) Amass 75 or more career pro starts (shortened to 60 for running backs to factor in the shorter shelf lives); b) Have garnered at least one first-team All-Pro or multiple Pro-Bowl berths; or c) Have a Pro Football Reference weighted approximate value of at least 50—a grading system used to help put the hard-to-quantify accomplishments of offensive linemen and other not-so-stat-dependent positions into comparative perspective.
Naturally, the criteria are somewhat biased against the players entering the league in recent drafts as the remainder have had more opportunity to build their pro résumés. Overall, though, applying these criteria, 146 NFL draft picks from 1993–2012 have been identified as late-round surprises who went on to have better-than-average NFL careers, and here’s how it all shook out:
Centers of Attention
But to get a true measure, we need to factor in the percentages.
Head of the (Draft) Class: ’93 and ’00 Rule
Pack Display Knack for Finding Late-Round Talent
The Pack, in fact, led the league by drafting 11 players on our list of 146 late-round standouts from 1993–2012. Overall, a full 20 of the team’s 90 fifth- through eighth-round selections during that span have gone on to start at least 40 NFL games and 10 have earned Pro Bowl nods.
That 40-start contingent also includes the likes of wide receiver Bill Schroeder and defensive end Kabeer Gbaja-Biamila, and the majority of those 20 players—aside from the obvious exceptions of Brunell and Hasselbeck—have played most of their careers in Green Bay.
Three other franchises—the Steelers (most notably Antonio Brown), Falcons (Jamal Anderson), and Giants (David Diehl)—originally drafted seven players apiece on the late-round list of 146, and 12 other teams are represented by at least five draftees.
Twelve of those 16 teams—led by the Packers at No. 2—rank among the league’s top half in winning percentage from 1993–2012.
Pure coincidence?
We think not.
Small Schools Big on Producing Late-Round Gems
So just where are these late-round draft finds coming from?
On our list of 146, schools from the current power five conferences still rule, naturally, producing 88—or 60.2 percent—of the 146 players.
Tennessee—led by Scott Wells and Gibril Wilson—has produced five late-round standouts—while Illinois (Diehl), Stanford (Richard Sherman) and Boston College (Hasselbeck) are represented by four apiece.
Overall, when it comes to conferences, the current members of the SEC—surprise!—and Big Ten lead with 21 players apiece among the group of 146, while the Pac-12 has produced 19, the ACC 15 and the Big 12 has, well, 12.
But that dominance isn’t as pronounced as it is in earlier rounds. Another 33 of the 146 (22.6 percent) hail from colleges in the remaining five FBS conferences, and 25—or a very solid 17.1 percent—call a current non-Division I school as their alma mater. That big-fish-little-pond group includes Driver (Alcorn State), Marques Colston (Hofstra), Robert Mathis (Alabama A&M), Rodney Harrison (Western Illinois), and Cortland Finnegan (Samford). So when you watch the draft next week, pay attention even when your team drafts a player you’ve never heard of from a school you’ve never heard of. He could very well be your team’s next star.
Information courtesy of pro-football-reference.com.