Chicago has the distinction of the most top-10 picks with the least amount of production.
The NFL Draft very often makes or breaks teams.
Teams that draft well generally do better than those that do not. And the first round is typically held to the highest standard among the picks because they are the highest and supposed to be, the most talented players.
I don’t think I’m sharing anything too crazy here by saying that the Chicago Bears don’t have a ton of success in the draft over the past 10 years.
FTN Fantasy writer Daniel Kelley decided to look at the past ten years of first round picks for each team and rank them best to worst.
He used a simple criterion: you picked a player, how did they do? And in that, how did they do, he’s looking at only their production for the team originally picking them. No measure of trade-ups or downs, no measure against a player they could’ve selected.
The Bears lacked a first round pick in three of the last ten years (2019 and 2020 due to the Khalil Mack trade and 2022 due to the trade up for Justin Fields). That hurt them but beside that, the players they did take just didn’t perform well.
Average pick: 7.1 (No. 32)
Percentage of games: 42.4% (No. 32)
They’re the only team averaging a pick better than 10th, and the team averaging 10th is the famously eff-them-picks Rams, who either pick early or don’t bother. When they have picked (the Bears didn’t select in the first round in 2019, 2020 or 2022), the Bears haven’t drafted worse than 11th since 2014, outside our sample. Despite that, the Bears have gotten less playing time from those first-rounders than any other...
Ouch.
Let’s break this down. The Bears have picked inside the top 10 in seven of the past 10 years, including six of the seven years they had a first round pick. The only year they were outside the top 10 was the Fields pick.
And the games played by those picks for Chicago is absurdly low, too.
Kevin White - 14 games
Leonard Floyd - 54 games
Mitchell Trubisky - 51 games
Roquan Smith - 69 games
Justin Fields - 40 games
Darnell Wright - 33 games
Caleb Williams - 17 games
Rome Odunze - 17 games
The Bears got about four seasons worth of production from Roquan Smith before he was traded and roughly three seasons worth from Trubisky and Floyd. Granted, Wright has missed just one game and Williams and Odunze played in all of theirs, but these three are still early in their evaluations.
The three missing picks hurt the overall numbers because they have fewer players in the sample size logging games.
Other teams with a similar percentage of game scores had more picks: Tennessee (11) and Las Vegas (12). While New England had the same number of picks as the Bears but a tad higher percentage of games (43.3).
Make sure you give the entire article a look because it’s interesting to see some teams with recent success, struggle in the first round too (Buffalo, Miami, Seattle and San Francisco).
Tomorrow, he’ll look at the teams with the most first round success.
