Ranking 12 biggest Seattle Seahawks draft gems of the last decade

Math and more math - and a comparison of Seahawks to make it easier

Two examples from opposite ends of the spectrum: Malik McDowell's 35th overall selection had a draft value of 1198. He produced 6 points of Approximate Value in his career. 6 divided by 1198 yields a relative production of .50, which is abysmal. Yes, I multiplied the result by 100 for those checking my math, and he still earned less than one point. Let's look at another Seahawks player, one who had a bigger impact than McDowell, but wasn't exactly a star, either. Wide receiver David Moore was a seventh-round pick, number 226 overall. His draft value was 253 points. At 12 points of average value, his relative production is 4.74.

But that only brings us to what these players have produced so far. The next step involves predicting what they'll produce over their entire careers. If I had a real answer for that, I'd be the most successful general manager in the history of the league. So with some seat-of-the-pants linear regression analysis - educated guesswork, basically - I projected career values for each player. It gets markedly harder with players at the start of their careers. CJ. Prosise provides just one cautionary tale.

Okay, back to Moore. Let's assume - a big assumption, true - that he has a bit of a resurgence and gets in a couple more seasons before he retires. I brought his career AV points to 14, which gave him a final relative production of 5.53. With a final adjustment for his position, based on Ethan Young's MAVEM work, I arrived at a final relative value of 4.94. I'd say that most 12s would agree that David Moore was at least ten times more valuable than Malik McDowell. So in a nutshell, that's how the method works. Alright, let's get to those gems! All draft data is from pro-football-reference.com.

As a point of reference, the entire Seahawks draft of 2013 produced just 57 AV points. That's exactly the same production as Frank Clark. The total value of those draft picks was 4,928 points. Seattle got the same total value of all that draft capital as they got from Clark, spread between 11 players. It wouldn't be so bad if that were their production in one season, but that is the total of their career production. The relative production of that entire draft class was 1.16. Woohoo, that's twice as good as Malik McDowell. Hey, at least we got the Captain of Techno Thursday out of it.