The Seahawks dominated the 2012 NFL Draft. Seattle drafted the best player, Russell Wilson, in the third round. The second most valuable pick of the draft was, by almost any measure, linebacker Bobby Wagner, a Hall of Fame candidate selected in the second round. The Seahawks even had one of the two or three best picks of the seventh round, in J.R. Sweezy.

And yet with its first pick in the draft, Seattle swung and missed on edge rusher Bruce Irvin, who played and started fewer games with the Seahawks than Sweezy.

The Redskins and Bucs had similar stories. Washington rolled snake eyes when it drafted RG3, although one could argue (depending on why you think he failed in D.C.) that his disappointing tenure with the Redskins wasn’t a fault of scouting. But the Redskins drafted Kirk Cousins in the 4th round and Alfred Morris in the 6th round — it was an extremely impressive draft once you forget the team’s first pick. Tampa Bay drafted a man without a position, safety/linebacker Mark Barron, with the seventh overall pick, and he lasted just 37 games with the team before being traded for 4th and 6th round picks. But the Bucs selected Doug Martin and Lavonte David with the team’s next two picks, and safety Keith Tandy was a good find (mostly on special teams) in the sixth round.

On the other side, you have the Panthers and Steelers. Carolina hit a home run with Luke Kuechly in the first round, but the Panthers next three picks have started just 37 games. The Panthers non-Kuechly portion of the draft was saved with Josh Norman in the sixth round, but even he only had one great year in Carolina.

Pittsburgh drafted an All-Pro in guard David DeCastro late in the first round, but the team’s next seven picks were disappointments. The Steelers final pick was OT Kelvin Beachum, a successful late round pick who started for two years in Pittsburgh.

These are all anecdotes, of course. The Jaguars (Justin Blackmon) and Browns (Trent Richardson) whiffed on their top-5 picks, and also performed poorly the rest of the draft. The Eagles (Fletcher Cox) and Broncos (Derek Wolfe) had very good first picks, and also good drafts the rest of the way. So I wanted to research the following question:

If you know how good a team’s first pick was in the 2012 Draft, would that help you determine whether the rest of that team’s draft was good or bad?

Here’s what I did to test this. I took the Draft AV grades for every player, which measures the amount of AV produced for each player by the team that drafted him. The top five players are Wilson with 88, Kuechly and Wagner with 73, Andrew Luck with 59, and Cox with 56 points. I then “re-did” the draft based on these point values: so the Colts with the first overall pick “should have” taken Wilson, and the teams with the 2nd and 3rd picks “should have” taken Kuechly and Wagner, and Luck “should have” gone fourth overall, and so on.

I then subtracted the amount of points the pick “should have” given the team from the amount of points of Draft AV they actually received. Surprisingly, Ryan Tannehill is the first player to be neutral in this draft, as he was the 8th pick and his 50 points of AV is tied for the 8th most in the Draft.  Players like Kuechly and Cox are big home runs, while most of the first round picks are obviously going to be somewhat disappointing since there isn’t much room to overachieve:

By this method, the Panthers, Steelers, Eagles, Broncos, and Texans were the best drafting teams based on their first pick, and the Browns, Jaguars, Bucs, Redskins, and Cowboys were the worst drafting teams based on their first pick.

But how did those teams fare the rest of the draft?  As it turns out, there wasn’t any correlation between a team’s grade on its first overall pick and its overall grade the rest of the draft.  The graph below shows the value provided by each team’s first pick (on the X-Axis) and value provided by the rest of the picks by that team (on the Y-Axis).  There is a slightly negative correlation.

And here is that information in table form.

Seattle has a draft grade that is 140 points above expectation. That comes despite a first pick that underachieved by 14 points, because the rest of the draft overachieved by 154 points.

So were the 2012 Seahawks a good drafting team? With Wilson, Wagner, Sweezy, and Jeremy Lane, Seattle had one of the best drafts of the last decade.  But the Seahawks have had some pretty mediocre drafts since then, and Seattle whiffed on its first pick in this same draft.  Maybe Seattle used to be a good drafting team, but if so, it was a fleeting occurrence, lasting from the 2nd through 7th rounds of the 2012 Draft.  Maybe some teams are good at drafting, but if so, they’re only good at drafting until the moment when they stop being good at drafting, which tends to happen without any notice.