All 32 teams, measured four different ways against the players who were still on the board. Buffalo comes out on top, and it is the only team whose margin survives a test against chance.
Order comes from a team's average rank across the four comparisons below. Gold is a team whose picks gained career value over the alternatives; red is a team that lost it.
Each number is career value gained or lost per pick, in wAV, against the alternative. Records read as team better–alternative better–even. Click a column to sort by it.
What this table is not. It is not a draft success analysis and it does not measure how much talent a team accumulated. It measures one thing: whether a pick outperformed the specific player taken right after him. A team can rank well here and still have a bare roster, because beating your neighbor on the board is not the same as landing a star. Washington is the clearest case, and most of the gaps in the middle of this table are not distinguishable from chance.
For every pick I asked the same four questions, then totaled the answers by team.
Better means a higher career wAV, Pro Football Reference's weighted Approximate Value, which condenses a career into one number that works across positions. Pairs within 2 wAV count as even. Career stats run through the 2025 season.
The Bills went 28–11–12 against the next pick and 30–9–11 against the next player at the position, a surplus of +571 wAV in career value over the players other teams took in the same spots. It comes from hitting repeatedly rather than from one star: Tre'Davious White, Matt Milano, Dawson Knox, Ed Oliver, Christian Benford, James Cook and Terrel Bernard all outplayed comparable players drafted after them.
The Chiefs rank first against ESPN's best available at +4.94 per pick. Patrick Mahomes at tenth in 2017, one pick ahead of Marshon Lattimore, is worth +72 on his own, and Creed Humphrey and Trey Smith are two of the largest late-round wins anywhere in the data.
The Lions lead everyone against the best available at the position, +5.85 per pick, almost entirely on the strength of 2021 through 2023: Penei Sewell, Amon-Ra St. Brown, Aidan Hutchinson, Jahmyr Gibbs and Brian Branch.
The Dolphins finish last in both position comparisons at −5.48 per pick, going 10–26–6 against the next player at the position. Both of their marquee offensive picks were followed closely by better players at the same spot: Tua Tagovailoa by −22 and Jaylen Waddle by −23.
The Patriots went 18–27–18 against the next pick, −256 wAV, with Sony Michel one selection ahead of Lamar Jackson as the single worst pick of the group. The Raiders finish last overall at 17–28–11; Maxx Crosby is the one big hit, while Henry Ruggs at twelfth in 2020, immediately before Justin Jefferson, costs them −56.
Both of those are descriptions of what happened, not findings about how these teams draft. Neither margin survives the test in the next section: the Raiders' last-place figure is the single least significant result in the table, and would be matched by chance about half the time.
All 32 teams are below, in alphabetical order. Click any one of them to see its record in all four comparisons, its largest swings against the very next selection, and a read on where its drafting has gone right and wrong.
Every one of the 2,312 picks behind these numbers is in the full spreadsheet, alongside each comparison and the method.
The counterfactual problem, and what each of the four comparisons does about it.
A draft is a chain reaction. The moment a team takes a different player, every pick after it changes. Different players come off the board, teams' needs shift, and the guy you wanted eight picks later might have been snapped up at pick three instead. So any "they should have taken X" that reaches deep into the round is quietly assuming that 30 other front offices would have behaved exactly the same way in a draft that no longer exists.
Comparing against the very next pick is the smallest possible change to history: one swap, and the rest of the draft is largely undisturbed. It's the cleanest counterfactual available.
It's also the honest one. If I went looking 8 or 9 picks down, I could find a good player after almost any selection ever made and call it a miss.
That's hindsight with a search function, not analysis.
My attempt to loosen the rule a little without losing the plot. It lets the alternative be a round or two later, but only at the position the team was actually drafting, so it stays a decision they were plausibly weighing in the room.
These handle the "who else was there?" question from the correct direction. They use a ranking written before the draft, so the alternative is a player the league itself had rated higher at that moment, not one we know turned out well.
The obvious objection to all of the above, tested rather than argued.
A reader called this junk science, on the grounds that comparing a pick to whoever happened to be taken next introduces so much randomness that the results stop meaning anything. That is a fair challenge and it has an answer, so here it is.
The raw noise is enormous, exactly as the objection says. The margin on a single pick has a standard deviation of 17.6 wAV, rising to 26.4 in the first round, and individual pairs run from −108 to +88. Nobody should read a single pick comparison as a judgment on a front office.
The question is whether that noise cancels out across the 41 to 63 picks each team made. To find out I ran a permutation test: shuffle which picks belong to which team 10,000 times, holding each team's round-by-round profile fixed so draft capital stays controlled, and count how often chance alone produces a result as extreme as the real one.
Not distinguishable from chance. If team identity carried no information at all, you would see a table this spread out about a quarter of the time. The ordered list is a description, not a ranking anyone should defend position by position.
Borderline, and just short of the conventional line, after accounting for the fact that we are looking at the best of 32 teams. On its own 51 picks Buffalo's margin has a 95% interval of +2.8 to +11.8, which clears zero. The strongest result here, and still not a comfortable one.
Nothing at all. A last-place finish this deep would happen by chance about half the time. This is why the claim that Las Vegas drafts worse than anyone has been removed from this piece.
Bootstrapping each team against its own picks says the same thing from another angle: only two of the 32 teams, Buffalo and Las Vegas, have a 95% interval that excludes zero, and the Las Vegas one only barely. Everything between second and thirty-first is statistically indistinguishable from everything else between second and thirty-first.
The bigger limit is structural, and it is not about sample size. This comparison is zero-sum: if my pick beats the next pick, that team loses by construction, so the league average is pinned near zero. It measures how a team did against its immediate neighbors on the board, not how much talent it came away with. Those are different questions, and they can point in opposite directions.
Washington is the cleanest example in the dataset, and it is worth spelling out because it cuts against my own table. The Commanders rank 9th against the next pick. On the absolute production of those same 61 picks they rank 29th of 32, at 11.4 wAV per pick against a league average of 13.6, with 7 Pro Bowl selections total, 28th in the league. That gap of 20 places is the largest of any team. Both numbers are correct. They answer different questions, and the second one is closer to what fans mean by drafting well.
Across all 32 teams the two rankings correlate at rho = 0.63, so they are related but far from the same measure. If what you want to know is which teams stocked their roster, rank by absolute value produced, not by this.
So what is left standing? The per-pick records are facts, and so are the individual swings: T.J. Watt really was taken one pick before Reuben Foster, and John Ross really did go one pick before Patrick Mahomes. Those need no inference. Buffalo's run is the one team-level result that holds up to scrutiny, and even that is borderline. The rest of the table is best read as a description of what happened rather than a measurement of how well each front office drafts.
That is a narrower claim than the one I started with, and the objection deserves the credit for it.