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With the 2013 NFL Draft, the Arizona Cardinals were going to build their team for the future.
The Arizona Cardinals and the rest of the NFL were wrong.
The NFL Draft of 2013 can unequivocally be identified as... bad.
Interesting stat I found researching this class: just 32 of the top-100 picks from 2013 are still with the team that drafted them. https://t.co/e1nnxCAccD
— Danny Kelly (@DannyBKelly) June 7, 2017
Obviously, the Arizona Cardinals have one of those players in Tyrann Mathieu, but overall, the NFL dropped the ball in terms of identifying talent.
If you look at the career approximate value, which is not the best way to identify overall play but one of the few tools we have, the top players from that draft were:
Le’Veon Bell, David Bakhtiari, Travis Frederick, Eddie Lacy, Kyle Long, DeAndre Hopkins, Alec Ogeltree, Ezekiel Ansah, D.J. Fluker and Jamie Collins.
Those names are telling:
- Four offensive lineman, two running backs, a wide reciever and three defensive front seven players.
- Four non first round picks.
- Three of the players not with their team that drafted them any longer.
The Cardinals had a bad draft, but so did every other team.
Sure, you would like to see your team be one of the outliers, but the teams that did the best, Kansas City with Eric Fisher and Travis Kelce, Green Bay with Lacy and Bakhtiari, and the Carolina Panthers with Star Lotulelei and Kawann Short.
In the short, Carolina is likely the best team from this draft if not KC, but there wasn’t a whole lot of great coming out of it.
Maybe we should be upset about the misses, but it takes some of the sting out of it knowing how bad the league did overall.