The 2005 NFL Draft is finally over, and although I didn't watch the entire fifteen hours of coverage offered on ESPN (I TiVo'd day two and saw bits and pieces while scanning through it), a few things jump out. Certainly, there will be no shortage of articles today focusing on Denver's bold (or misguided) selection of Maurice Clarett at the end of Round 3, Aaron Rodgers's freefall from potential #1 to the rear of the first round, and the draft's winners and losers. But taking a step back and looking at the draft from a broader view, it's interesting to look at where the players came from. In seven rounds, ranging from Alex Smith to Adam "Mr. Irrelevant" Stokes, 255 players were selected from 109 different four-year universities and a few junior colleges. As expected, programs like Oklahoma, Florida State, and USC were well represented, but when you look at the top dozen schools along with their 2004 won-loss records (see chart below), one school jumps out.
| School | # Drafted | '04 Record |
|---|---|---|
| Oklahoma | 11 |
12-1 |
| Florida State | 9* |
9-3 |
| Virginia | 7 |
8-4 |
| Wisconsin | 7 |
9-3 |
| Georgia | 6 |
10-2 |
| Louisville | 6 |
11-1 |
| Stanford | 6 |
4-7 |
| Cal | 5 |
10-2 |
| Iowa | 5 |
10-2 |
| Miami | 5 |
9-3 |
| USC | 5 |
13-0 |
| Utah | 5 |
12-0 |
* Includes Adrian McPherson You'd expect that the schools with the highest number of NFL draft picks would be among the best in the country, and that's certainly the case. There are eleven teams with at least eight wins (and seven with at least ten). Eleven teams that played in bowl games. Eleven teams that are typically thought of as having strong football programs. And there's Stanford. Cardinal head coach Buddy Teevens was fired just a few days after the close of the season, perhaps because he could manage only four wins with a team that included six '05 NFL draft picks. Without looking through the other 97 schools who had players selected this weekend, I'm fairly comfortably going out on a limb and saying that Stanford was the only school with more draft picks than wins -- quite an accomplishment. So what do we make of this? Not a lot. Stanford has actually been fairly consistent in developing NFL talent, sending a handful of players on to the professional ranks every year, but the problem will always be depth. Their recruiting pool is just a touch shallower than, say, USC for example. And so today, by one measure at least, the Stanford Cardinal sit along side the giants of the game. In September, when they start playing games again, expect things to go back to normal.
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