Steelemas, nugget no. 2

Phil Steele tracks something he calls Draft Day Party Hangover, which sounds like something you’d expect — teams that have more players drafted by the NFL after a given season have a marked tendency to do as well the following season.

His metric works as follows:  he assigns a team 7 points for every player it has that goes in the first round of the draft, 6 points for second round selections, etc.  Over the past 25 years, teams with 12 or more points have a 73.4% chance of having a weaker or the same record the next season.  For teams with 24 or more points, it’s an 80.2% chance.  And for teams with 35 or more points, it’s 75%.

That does look a little bell curvy there, but I digress.

There is only one team going into the ’22 season that qualified for Steele’s top category.  You only get one guess as to which team that is.

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Steelemas, nugget no. 1

Picked up my copy of the 2022 Preview yesterday, and as is my want, on the first day I just tend to wander randomly through the contents.  Here’s a factoid that caught my eye:

If the 12-team playoff was in effect back to 2014 then 14 teams in that 7-year span would have been in the playoffs with 3 losses.

But think of all the extra money the P5 would have taken in over that time!  Seems like a fair tradeoff, at least to Mickey.

Today, in gappin’

The top four spots on USA Today’s top 10 SEC players list are occupied by two from Alabama and two from Georgia.