Welcome to April football, fans! With the first wave of NFL free agency well in the review mirror, we now turn our attention to phase two of your favorite team’s plans to strengthen its roster – the 2019 NFL Draft, which starts April 25. As this year’s draft inches closer, The Athletic D.C. decided to take a look at the recent draft history of each NFC East team and try to assess both the quantitative and qualitative results of their roster building through this most important tool. We opted to look at the last five years’ worth of drafts in the division, from 2014 to 2018.
The quantitative side is simple: Player retention over the five years was measured by the combined number of players selected from each of the drafts who made the 2018 roster, divided by the combined number of players taken from each draft to come up with a percentage. If Team A had 17 players from the last five drafts remaining on the 2018 roster, but had 24 overall draft picks in those…
