At the end of April it’s time again: The 32 NFL teams will be able to choose the best college players in the draft. SPOX gives an overview of the rounds, the dates, the compensatory picks, the combines and everything worth knowing.
The Draft 2018 will rise from 26. till 28. April local time at the Dallas Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas. The Draft will be in its 83rd year. This is the first time that this event will be held in an NFL stadium for the first time, and it is also the first draft to be held in Texas.
The first draft round will start on 27. April at 2am German time. On the second day there will be the second and third round, on the third day there will be rounds four to seven.
From 27. February until February 5th In March, over 300 draft prospects will be able to prove themselves at the Scouting Combine in Indianapolis. There are standardized tests to test explosiveness, strength and agility. Above all, however, it is interesting for the teams to be able to have direct conversations with college players and get a feel for how a player ticks. The workout plan on the course looks like this:
First of all, each team receives one pick per round, divided into seven rounds. In each round, the worst team from the previous year may select a player first, followed by the second worst team and so on – until the defending champion is allowed to play.
On the one hand, however, there are the Compensatory Picks, i. e. additional draft picks that are distributed from the league to the teams whose players have received the most expensive contracts in the Free Agency elsewhere and who have also signed less expensive contracts themselves. The exact formula used for this is not publicly known.
In addition, draft picks, now also called compensatory picks, may be involved in trades. So it’s quite possible that teams in some rounds have several picks and in others teams don’t have any picks at all. The Buffalo Bills and the Cleveland Browns, for example, will go into the coming draft with two first-round draft picks each.
between the raiders and the 49ers there will be a coin toss between all tie-breakers to decide who gets to pick first.
In the first round, each team has ten minutes for its pick. So when the draft starts, the clock is ticking for Cleveland: The Brown’s then have ten minutes to submit their pick – the name of a college player who has signed up for the draft.
The time slot can also be used to trade your own pick, i. e. to swap with another team. Cleveland could exchange his number one pick with the Broncos and get back several picks in return.
In the second round, the teams still have seven minutes to go, from the third to the sixth round only five minutes before they announce their decision. In the seventh and final round, the new pick must be submitted after four minutes.
32 Compensatory picks were distributed by the league for the 2018 draft. A Compensatory Pick can be handed out at the end of the third round at the earliest. The overview:
Back in the mid-1930s, Eagles co-owner Bert Bell had already seen enough of the supremacy of the powerful Bears, Packers, Giants and Redskins: at the owner’s meeting, he applied for a draft system for college players so that the worst team would have a chance at the best player.
In this way, a certain amount of equality of opportunity should be guaranteed by preventing the best (and richest) teams on the open market from securing the best available young players every year. Since then, scouting has developed into a true science – in the 1950s, teams sometimes chose players who had never seen them play before.
The NFL is far from that today. From the Scouting Combine to Pro Days to various draft shows – the draft is a huge event, and from January onwards the players will be training according to the draft tests. For teams and scouts, it is a window of several months to take a close look at the college prospects.
As part of the draft reporting, there will also be several mock-drafts on SPOX. The first two rounds have been started by the mySPOX community, which has set itself the first two rounds.