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Are We Getting Better or Are They Getting Worse? Draft Position, Strength of Schedule, and Competitive Balance in the National Football League

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Abstract

Monopsonistic labor market institutions, such as amateur drafts and free agency restrictions, are often justified by their competitive balance generating properties. In this paper we reexamine the balancing effect of the amateur draft for the National Football League. We extend an earlier treatment of this issue by Grier and Tollison (J Econ Behav Organ 33:136–149, 1994) by incorporating the unbalanced scheduling policy of the league, relative team payrolls, and team injury rates into our empirical model. We find that the college draft has a quantitatively strong and statistically significant effect on team performance even when incorporating several significant controls.

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Notes

  1. See www.nfl.com for more information on NFL schedule determination.

  2. New England was forced to forfeit their first round draft selection in 2008 because of violations of league videotaping rules in what became known as “Spygate” (Battista 2007). We code their draft selection for this year as 33. We also estimated the model with their draft selection coded as 62, which is their first overall draft selection (second round) that year, and obtained virtually identical results.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Dayton, 300 College Park, Dayton, OH, 45469, USA

    Tony Caporale

  2. University of Dayton, Dayton, OH, USA

    Trevor C. Collier

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  1. Tony Caporale
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  2. Trevor C. Collier
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Correspondence to Tony Caporale.

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Caporale, T., Collier, T.C. Are We Getting Better or Are They Getting Worse? Draft Position, Strength of Schedule, and Competitive Balance in the National Football League. J Labor Res 36, 291–300 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12122-015-9206-z

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