Chiefs First Rounders: What to expect?

Aaron CurryI'm working on a massive draft analysis going back to 1970 for all teams and all rounds. I will only have to do it once and after that, I’ll know everything I ever wanted to know. Unfortunately, it is going to take a lot of time for a long time to come. In the meantime, here is one simple part of it. I’ve taken a look at Kansas City’s first round draft picks for each year since 1970 and tried to determine a few things from it. My pick in this year’s draft is Aaron Curry. Even if there were no other reason, you will see why below…

Initially, I will list all the first rounders for KC since 1970 along with the basic information. The key components here are the number of games started and the number of pro-bowls - regardless of whether they stayed with KC or not. This is about the quality of the pick only, not necessarily how good it was for KC.

Using starts and pro bowls is the best way I know to evaluate (without getting ridiculously complicated) the success level of a player. Obviously, if I were seriously interested in a single player, then I would do a much more comprehensive analysis. But, with respect to a lot of players (and this is part of my big project), starts and pro-bowls will be enough to determine what I want to know. Comments below.

PB – Pro Bowl

GS – Games started based upon 10 years. I’m making the assumption for this analysis that 10 years in the NFL should be expected for a first-rounder.

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The most obvious thing that leaps out at me is 1970-1976. Talk about horrible draft picks. The group of five had a combined total of 26 starts in their careers! The next person (Green) had over five times as many starts as the previous five combined!

Of course, there is a big difference between expectations of a player in the top-10 versus 11-20 or 21-30. So, I did a group hug and bunched them together. Shown is each.

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Of course, the sample size is small and it’s hard to make too much out if it, but clearly we should expect more out of a top-10 player. Even truer, we should expect a lot out of a top-5 pick. Here are the 10 players that were picked in the top-10. Sorted by pick.

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I think it is pretty clear that the Chiefs have done very well selecting a defensive player in the top-10. Whether that’s true across the board for other teams, I have no idea… yet. Anyway, this is why (in addition to the fact that the Chiefs defense sucked last season) I want to see them pick Curry. I can easily see his name on this list in the future with lots of starts and PBs next to him.