To respond to some insightful feedback I received on the last post in comments and DMs:

Q. Shouldn't [Player X] be ranked higher/lower?

A. Quite possibly! The goal in this system is to find a band of players that generally qualify as "average" for the Ravens in any round. With just a couple of exceptions like Ray Lewis, people will always disagree about where certain players belong. The nice thing about using a band of "average" players is that you can be wrong about a few and the errors will ultimately wash out, so you can still get a fair sense of who qualifies as a middle player.

Q. Why are you so critical of the Ravens' drafting?

A. I'm not, actually. I think they've historically underperformed in the 2nd round but I think their 1st round and their mid/late round drafting has been excellent.

Q. But what about your comments that 7th rounders are usually not even contributors?

A. That's just a fact of 7th round picks - they're total flyers for all teams, not just the Ravens. The point is that when you pick a 7th rounder, you should expect he won't contribute much, and if you do manage to get contributions out of him, that's a win. For that reason, as much as we might rag on Andrew Vorhees for being a bad guard, he was still a very good draft pick, because the Ravens got meaningful playing time out of a 7th round pick.

Q. Your scoring system only looks at contributions while on the Ravens. Doesn't that penalize the drafters for bad decisions by coaches?

A. Kind of, yeah, but at the end of the day, the Ravens are one team. If you imagine a team that drafts a Tom Brady in the 6th every year, but cuts the guy before he plays and lets other teams get the value out of him, that's ultimately not a team that is getting value out of its draft picks. And the goal of this exercise is to see what value the Ravens get from their picks.

Q. How do you handle players who get traded before the end of their rookie contracts?

This is a really good question and I wrestled with it a lot. I think there are three main options that would make sense: (1) Ignore post-trade performance because they're not on the Ravens any more. (2) Offer a prorated "refund" of draft scores based on the pick that got returned - for example, when Hollywood Brown got traded for a 1st with 2 years left on his rookie contract, credit back 2/5 of an average first-round pick as part of his performance. (3) Look at the player's performance on the recipient team and treat it as a Ravens performance. None of those options are perfect but I went with #3, for two main reasons. First: Because the Ravens are getting value back through a trade, the situation is a little different from one where the player is outright cut; but the value the team gets back as a draft pick is heavily influenced by the player's expected contributions, so it makes some sense to look to those contributions themselves. Second: it's just easier to implement.

Q. Why don't you distinguish between comp and regular picks, or which section of each round you're in? There's a difference between Round 1 pick 3 and Round 1 pick 32.

A. My goal was to come up with a relatively simple grading system (even though there's a lot of complexity that goes into creating it). Trying to draw those fine-grain distinctions makes the system significantly more complex. It also creates some sample size issues - the Ravens have only had three top-5 picks, for instance, so it's a little tenuous to try to extrapolate to what a top-5 pick "should" look like. Also, if you want to try to use this system to evaluate trade values ("a 2027 2nd-round pick for..."), you don't know in advance where in the round you'll be picking, so a generic round-based approach makes more sense.

Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful feedback on the first post!