NFL Draft

Seven schools have had a player drafted in the NFL every year since 1967

uscIt is very difficult to be drafted in the NFL. There are 115 colleges with NCAA Division I football programs, give or take half a dozen in any given year. These colleges can offer up to 85 scholarships per year, but every team has some non-scholarship players, so let’s estimate that there are an average of 110 players on a Division I team. A quick check of the rosters shows that each team has between 10 and 20 seniors. So let’s say that each team has an average of 15 seniors. That makes for a total of 12,650 players, with 1,725 seniors. But that doesn’t count Division II, which has roughly the same number of teams, so double those numbers to 25,300 players and 3,450 seniors. So the first lesson that our foray into math offers is that not every college football player makes it to his senior year, and being offered a scholarship out of high school is no guarantee of eventually entering the NFL draft.

So, including the 100 or so underclassmen who leave college and declare themselves eligible for the NFL draft, that’s a pool of 3,500 plus players who could be drafted. Now consider the number of players who were drafted by NFL teams in 2014: 254. In other words, only approximately 7% of eligible players get drafted. Those players then have to compete with everyone else on the roster, plus any undrafted college free agents (that is, players who weren’t drafted but are still offered the chance to try to make the roster), plus any other veterans or players from other leagues the team might want to check out, just to make it onto the Week 1 roster.

So this statistic is a pretty amazing stat:

2015 NFL Draft    @DraftRT
7 schools have at least 1 player taken in #NFLDraft since 1967: #ArizonaState #Florida #Michigan #MichiganState #Nebraska #Tennessee #USC

Damond Talbot

NFL Draft Diamonds was created to assist the underdogs playing the sport. We call them diamonds in the rough. My name is Damond Talbot, I have worked extremely hard to help hundreds of small school players over the past several years, and will continue my mission. We have several contributors on this site, and if they contribute their name and contact will be in the piece above. You can email me at nfldraftdiamonds@gmail.com

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