Andy Reid’s Top 100 List – over the years many fans have come to pay a majority of attention to the top 100 players in the draft. We’ll take a look here at Andy Reid’s history of selecting players in the top 3 rounds of the draft, operating under the idea that those are the players who make up the core group of a team. While that assumption is mostly true, don’t fall asleep on the regular contributions of UDFAs who matched the contributions of 4th and 5th round players in 2017 (see below).
While I’m going to focus on Andy Reid’s history of selecting top 100 players by position here, let’s not forget the UDFA contributions of crucial players in Reid’s SB winning effort like: Damien Williams, Charvarius Ward, Byron Pringle, Ben Niemann, and Daniel Sorensen… or even the 6th and 7th round starters, LDT and Austin Reiter.
In 2019, Jason Fitzgerald, at Over the Cap, broke down the newest players to the NFL by round and UDFA:
2019 NFL Rosters by Original Draft Slot
UDFA- 30.9%
Rd 1- 14.3%
Rd 2- 11.0%
Rd 3- 11.1%
Rd 4- 9.9%
Rd 5- 8.6%
Rd 6- 8.4%
Rd 7- 5.7%— Jason_OTC (@Jason_OTC) September 3, 2019
“The NFL has 1,696 players and of those 1,696 almost 31 percent of them did not hear their names called in the NFL Draft.” – NFL Draft Diamonds
General Manager, Brett Veach, and his team of scouts did a good job this past offseason as every draft pick played at least 10% of the regular season snaps except 7th rounder Nick Allegretti. From Pro Football Reference:
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- Mecole Hardman (471, 44.86%)
- Juan Thornhill (996, 90.14%)
- Khalen Saunders (303, 27.42%)
- Rashad Fenton (165, 14.93%)
- Darwin Thompson (107, 10.19%)
- Nick Allegretti (8, .76%)
Also from Cat Scratch Reader:
“Believe it or not, in 2017 there were more UDFAs playing at least 40-percent of offensive or defensive snaps than any other group except for first round draft picks. But to be fair with the players who were actually drafted, there can be upward of 500 UDFAs flooding the NFL every year where there are only somewhere between 32 and about 40 players drafted each round when including compensatory draft picks.”
Andy Reid’s Top 100
All of that mentioned so far is just to give the following information some perspective. So, let’s take a look at the positions that Reid has drafted over the past 21 seasons.
While this chart spells out exactly: the position, who was taken, the round, the overall number they were taken, and the year… this chart is too small to read, even if you expand it. So, here’s another look at the numbers without all the details:
Key: the green boxes represent players taken while Reid was in Philly while the red filled boxes represent the players taken while Reid has been in K.C..
You can see I’m looking for clues at the scene of the crime, and I could have called this piece, “The Drafting Pathology of Andy Reid.” With wide receivers taking the prize for the mostest drafted prospects… the combo of DE and OLB (Rush-DL) together should actually take the cake.
You can also see that reid has taken no Offensive Centers in the first three rounds. Yes, a player like Mitch Morse, who was drafted as an OG, became a Center, but he was not taken as one.
It’s also clear that Reid, in Philly, took more LBs than the two he’s has taken while in K.C. — Nico Johnson and Dorian O’Daniel — and I haven’t been very impressed with either of them. O’Daniel had 5 (five) total defensive snaps in 2019 and the rest (292) were Special Teams snaps. Even though he’s been very good on Special Teams, it’s not the production you might hope you’d receive from a 3rd round pick (2018).
Based on that information, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see the Chiefs make a move early in the draft (rounds 1-through-3) for a Linebacker. The same challenge exists: this is not a very good draft for talented LBs.
Even if you count Isaiah Simmons as a LB (which I don’t, but since CBS Sports does, I’ll go with that)… there will ultimately only be two LBs taken in the first round: Clemson’s Simmons and Oklahoma’s Kenneth Murray. Neither CBS or DrafTek have any other LBs listed as 1st round picks.
The point is, it seems highly unlikely that Veach is going to jump up in the first round high enough to get one of the only two linebackers in this draft who could make a difference.
If you consider that the OLBs and the DEs together make up a position that you could re-name, Rush-DL, then that’s the position that should never be out of the question when it comes to Reid and making his first round picks. Throw DT Chris Jones into that mix and it’s obvious that getting to the QB on defense has been his number one drafting goal.
In that case, choosing a dynamic wideout comes next in line. Think back to Freddie Mitchell, DeSean Jackson, Jeremy Maclin, Chris Conley, and Mecole Hardman from last year. If you add up all the Rush-DLs and all the WRs reid has taken together and they equal 31.3% of all the draft picks he’s made in rounds one-three, nearly one-third. That also mean, it is almost a certainty that the Chiefs will select a WR or Rush-DL in the first three rounds of this year’s draft.
That means we should likely pay more attention to those two position groups during the remaining days of the combine. WRs ran yesterday but DL prospects run tomorrow. Since the Chiefs only have two CBs under contract (so far), we should probably keep an eye on that group as well and they run on Sunday after noon from 1:00 to 6:00 PM CST.
We’ll continue to follow their progress right here on ArrowheadOne in an OPEN THREAD.
Laddie Morse — ArrowheadOne.
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