028: 🏈 NFL draft tiers by college team
Tiers of college teams with the most NFL draft picks since 1994.
The 1994 NFL draft was the first year the draft was reduced to seven rounds. The number one pick was defensive tackle Dan Wilkinson from the Ohio State University.
So, which college teams have the produced the most draft picks since 1994?
Using data from drafthistory.com, there are 55 schools with at least 50 or more picks since the 1994 draft. If we break out these college teams into tiers, we find the following interesting tidbits:
Ohio State (189), Alabama (170), Florida (162), Georgia (161), LSU (158), and Florida State (153) are the only teams with 150+ picks.
USC (148) is the next closest to the “elite tier” and the Trojans have the most quarterbacks (10) drafted since 1994.
Nebraska (115) has produced more draft picks than Clemson (110) since 1994. Of course, the Tigers (67) have almost doubled the Cornhuskers (35) draft pick total since 2010.
North Carolina (99) last won the ACC Championship in 1980. The twist is that Tar Heels claim more draft picks than Auburn (98), Texas (92), and Oregon (90) since 1994.
What about #goacc teams?
2014 was the first season ACC football featured its current conference outfit as Louisville replaced Maryland. If we filter the data since the 2015 draft, we establish the following tiers and notes:
Clemson (43 picks) leads the league, which is no surprise. Given Miami is on its fourth head coach since 2014, it’s somewhat surprising the Hurricanes have the same number of draft picks (37) as Notre Dame since 2015.
The league has featured 14 quarterbacks that were drafted across nine different teams, and eight of those quarterbacks were selected in the first or second round.
It’s remarkable to remember both UNC (Mitchell Trubisky, 2nd overall in 2017) and Duke (Daniel Jones, 6th overall in 2019) had quarterbacks selected in the top-10. The two schools finished with an 8-5 record in those respective seasons.
Syracuse (7) and Duke (7) have generated the fewest number of draft picks across the league since 2015. Two of the Orange’s seven picks were punters (Riley Dixon, 7th round in 2016 and Sterling Hofrichter, 7th round in 2020). Dixon has played in 114 career games with 512 punts.
Enjoy the 2023 NFL Draft and all of its bad information. Curious to see which teams continue to produce picks. And if you’re interested in a college football podcast, I recommend checking out Split Zone Duo.
The code for this post can be found here. The data was snagged from drafthistory.com, and the tier tables modify the function from the cfbplotR package.