Success on the Field and in the Draft, Which Comes First? Does it Matter?

This morning on ESPN Radio's "Mike and Mike in the Morning," (I like the "white noise" while I work) the slight, geeky Mike challenged the large, former-football-playing Mike to name his 4 Notre Dame teammates that were drafted along with him in the 1985 draft. And that struck me a bit because Notre Dame wasn't very good in Mike Golic's time (It was the Faust-era, after all), but ND still managed to have 5 draftees in 1985. And then I wondered what sort of correlation, if any, exists between success on the field and the number of draftees you have on the field. In other words, does the number of players that will be drafted in the next draft matter to the success of your team?

The obvious answer is, of course, yes. The more draftees you have, the more talent you must have, and thus you're probably going to be better than if you have very few draftees. Thing is, Notre Dame had a few draftees on the roster in 2007 (4), but still managed to win only 3 games. Golic's ND team won 7 games in 1984 despite just one more player on the roster to eventually be drafted the following spring. Maybe success on the field isn't so obviously correlated with NFL-level talent on the field after all.

For fun, I took a look at the win totals of Notre Dame for each season from 1977 to 2007, and then compared that to the number of players drafted the following season from Notre Dame. And I was sort of surprised by what I found.

First, here are the raw numbers for each season in Wins, Number of Draftees the following spring, Number of 1st Rounders, and Number of 1st-3rd Rounders.

And here's a graph to visualize the data...

(You may need to click on the chart to enlarge it.)

As you can see from the correlation calculations in the spreadsheet, while there is a "moderate" correlation between success on the field and NFL-level talent, it's not very strong (Perfect correlation would be indicated by +1, while perfect negative correlation would be indicated by -1).

Observations That Sound Interesting Anyway:

• Let's say that at Notre Dame, if you win 7 or fewer games in a season, you've had a terrible season. That happened 14 times from 1977 to 2007 (1979. 1981-1986, 1994, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2004, and 2007). Some will argue with my definition of "terrible," but, as we like to say in the halls of HLS Central, "This is freaking Notre Dame." In those 14 seasons, Notre Dame averaged 4 players on the roster drafted the following year. In the "acceptable" or better seasons (8+ wins), Notre Dame averaged 7 such players.
• In the years studied, Weis, still a bit of an enigma as far as performance as HC goes, has managed to have the lowest season-total of wins per NFL draftee in 2007 (.75) and yet also have the only "acceptable or better" season with 3 or fewer NFL draftees in 2005 (3.0 wins per draftee).
• In seasons from 1977-2007 in which the Irish were at some point ranked in the top 5, Notre Dame averaged 6.67 NFL draftees on the roster.
• In those Top 5 seasons (18 in total), there was an average of 1.06 first rounders on the roster, but in about 1/3rd of the seasons, there were no first rounders on the roster. And, in fact, each of those 5 draft classes with 0 first rounders were followed up by draft classes with no more than 1 first rounder. Those 5 rosters also only had an average of 2 players drafted in the first 3 rounds in the next spring, but they still managed to average 7 overall draftees. So does the draft position really matter?
• That average number of draftees after an "acceptable or better" season (7)? That's only 1 fewer than the total number of seniors on ND's 2007 roster (8). Think about that for a moment.

So yeah, we didn't learn much aside from some trivia. Talent helps. It probably helps a lot, but it doesn't guarantee anything one way or another.