Does Where You Grow Up Affect Your Chances of Being Drafted into the NFL?

Presentation Author(s) Information

Walker Head, WalkerHeadFollow

Abstract

The minimum rookie salary in the National Football League (NFL) is $450,000. First round picks often sign multi-year contracts worth more than $10 million. Players from some states are much more likely to receive college scholarships and eventually be drafted into the NFL, but it is not clear if this is a causal relationship. Utilizing data from Rivals and the NFL, I attempt to determine if where a player grew up has an impact on his chances of being drafted to play professional football. I focus on the top eight states, as it relates to percentage of recruits and my data set is repeated cross-sectional, analyzing the 2015 and 2016 draft classes. My dependent variables consist of state dummies, position dummies, rivals top 250 dummy, and pre-draft player grades. To the best of my knowledge, this is one of the first studies conducted on the relationship between geographical location and player draftability (how well a player is suited to be drafted). My results imply that some states have a positive effect on players being drafted, while others have a negative effect.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS
 

Does Where You Grow Up Affect Your Chances of Being Drafted into the NFL?

The minimum rookie salary in the National Football League (NFL) is $450,000. First round picks often sign multi-year contracts worth more than $10 million. Players from some states are much more likely to receive college scholarships and eventually be drafted into the NFL, but it is not clear if this is a causal relationship. Utilizing data from Rivals and the NFL, I attempt to determine if where a player grew up has an impact on his chances of being drafted to play professional football. I focus on the top eight states, as it relates to percentage of recruits and my data set is repeated cross-sectional, analyzing the 2015 and 2016 draft classes. My dependent variables consist of state dummies, position dummies, rivals top 250 dummy, and pre-draft player grades. To the best of my knowledge, this is one of the first studies conducted on the relationship between geographical location and player draftability (how well a player is suited to be drafted). My results imply that some states have a positive effect on players being drafted, while others have a negative effect.