Monday, August 23, 2010

What college game had the most future NFL players?

That simple question was raised on the O-Zone forum and I decided to take a crack at answering it.  First a few caveats.  The first thing you need to do is to define what is a NFL player.  Is it someone that plays in a game or is merely being on the roster good enough?  What if they are put on a practice squad -- does that count?  What about players that are invited to tryout - should they count?  The best answer would probably be any player that gets into a game would be considered an NFL player.  The problem is I don't know anywhere that I can find that data along with the player's college and years they attended school.  I do have easy access to the NFL draft information so I decided to define an NFL player as anyone that is drafted by the NFL.



That lead me to my second problem.  The NFL draft has expanded over the years while at the same time they've reduced the number of rounds in the draft.  For instance the draft had 20 rounds before 1967, then 17 from 1967-76, 12 from 1977-92, 8 in 1993, and 7 rounds from 1994-present.  An odd coincedence is that the NFL expanded at same time they reduced the number of rounds so the number drafted hasn't been as extreme.  This creates an issue when trying to compare players drafted.  For example in 1976 there were 487 players drafted while in 1994 there were only 222.  The thing is the reason the NFL reduced the number of rounds is they realized that very few players ever make the squad that aren't drafted.  So my assumption is to count a player as an NFL player if they were drafted in the top 250 picks (this is a bit unfair to 1994 but this was the only year it was this low.  The league expanded the next year and the new contract created compesation picks for losing free agents taking the number consistently around 250).

Using draft history I calculated 4 numbers for every game played since 1989 - players drafted from a college in 4 years following the game, 3 years, and 2 years.  So using those assumptions here are the rankings from 1989 - 2006:

61-43-35 - 2002 Ohio State vs Miami (62)
60-42-31 - 1989 Notre Dame @ Miami (71)
59-46-30 - 2000 Florida vs Miami (60)
59-45-28 - 1990 Penn State @ Notre Dame (64)
59-44-29 - 2005 USC vs Texas (59)
58-46-28 - 1990 Miami @ Notre Dame (65)
58-43-32 - 1990 Notre Dame @ Tennessee (62)
58-41-27 - 2002 Florida State @ Miami (59)
57-44-30 - 2000 Florida State @ Miami (58)
56-43-24 - 1999 Ohio State vs Miami (56)
56-42-28 - 1999 Miami @ Florida State (56)
56-42-34 - 2004 USC vs Oklahoma (56)
56-39-23 - 1989 Notre Dame @ Penn State (63)
55-41-28 - 2001 Miami @ Florida State (56)
55-41-31 - 1992 Penn State  @ Notre Dame (55)
55-39-23 - 1999 Tennessee @ Florida (57)
55-39-27 - 1999 Tennessee @ Florida (57)
54-44-27 - 2003 Miami @ Florida State (55)
54-42-31 - 1989 Notre Dame @ USC (62)
54-42-28 - 1994 Colorado @ Nebraska (54)
54-39-23 - 1999 Georgia @ Tennessee (56)

The first three numbers are players drafted and the number in parenthesis is the total number drafted.  As you can see the Miami-Notre Dame game had the most players drafted but that was partially due to a 12 round draft.  If you look "apples to apples" the game with the most NFL players was the 2002 Miami-Ohio State game with 61.  There are a surprising number of teams close to that but no one comes close to the 35 players drafted in the following two years.  What is amazing is the number of high draft choices as 26 of the 61 were drafted in the first 2 rounds.

At some point I may get bored and get the draft information from 1967-1988 and see how the schools in that era did.  I doubt going any further back makes sense as the number of teams was so small along with competition with the AFL makes it hard to compare.

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