It has become cliché at this point to believe that finding success in the NFL is as easy as looking at a page with numbers on it. The rise in popularity is likely connected to the possibility that statistics and analytics and organizational rebuilding plans based on tangentially-related Moneyball-adjacent philosophies are a shortcut towards answers that don’t even require watching football.
One such number is the popular idea of “draft capital,” a concept that attempts to add up every team’s pick in a given year based on draft position and number of selections, then assign a value to each and rank them.