The 2013 Draft was not supposed to be a very good one. All you need to know: an offensive tackle from a MAC school, Eric Fisher, was the number one pick in a draft that was considered weak at the top.  You might think that pick was a bust, but… by 2013 standards, it was not.  Fisher has been a five-year starter and sneaks into the top 10 in AV from players in that draft!  That in itself is pretty remarkable, as Fisher hasn’t sniffed a Pro Bowl, but in a weak class, being a five-year starter at an important position let him rack up the AV.

The top player from that draft has been RB Le’Veon Bell, with two OL (David Bakhtiari and Travis Frederick) and a player about to join his third team (Sheldon Richardson) the next three players by AV.

How does the 2013 Draft compare to other drafts through five years? Because of the different number of picks in each draft, I decided to only examine the first 32 picks in each draft. The graph below shows the cumulative AV (through 5 seasons, regardless of whether they switched teams) provided by all players selected in the top 32 of each draft.

By this measure, the remarkable 2011 Draft (Cam Newton, J.J. Watt, Von Miller, Patrick Peterson, and Julio Jones were all top-12 picks) stands out as the best first round since the merger.  The draft two years later, though, looks like one of the worst, and the worst since the early ’90s.

As the 2018 Draft is just days away, this is a good reminder that not all drafts are created equal.

Here’s the same chart, but looking at the top 100 draft picks. The 2012 Draft now moves ahead of the 2011 Draft, and the 2013 Draft looks quite a bit better: