I almost forgot to post this, but after getting the first pick in my fantasy baseball draft, I thought of this article. The Economist, of all places, described a study being conducted by two B-school profs that seems to support what we all intuitively know: the first pick in the NFL draft isn’t necessarily as great as it could be. The profs used the salaries of vets to map fair market value for different levels of performance and then compared that to intial contract offers and signing bonuses. As you might expect, the top picks are vastly overpaid. The full paper can be found at http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/edo1/massey.pdf.

I haven’t read the whole thing, but it looks like it might be pretty interesting. Most of you are probably familiar with Bill James and his band of merry followers. Mark Cuban and folks like John Hollinger are bringing similar techniques and, more importantly, similar mindsets to basketball. It’ll be interesting to see if it pays out in other sports the same way it has in baseball. I’m still not convinced that player stats are as powerful as they are in baseball though…