Are drafting and keeping the same skill? It is the question this whole project was built around, and at the threshold that matters, the answer is: barely. Of the 32 NFL franchises, only two teams rank top-five in both draft hit rate (2012 through 2022) and retention of the 2017 through 2021 cohort on the 2025 roster. The Eagles and the Chiefs. Every other contender, every other reputation, every other draft-and-develop story breaks down on one side or the other.
This piece is the methodology piece for the series. It explains how we measure each side, ranks all 32 teams on each, and points to the deep-dives ahead.
A note on the threshold. Earlier versions of this piece used a 100-snap line for “hit,” which is roughly the bar a player clears by playing in two or three games. The league hit rate at that line runs around 85 percent. The number was wide enough that almost every drafter looked like a successful one and almost every retention chart was driven by which teams cycled the most warm bodies through the roster. We have raised the line to 500 snaps in any single regular season, the threshold where a player has spent at least one year as a real rotational contributor. The league baseline is now 57 percent. The piece you are reading uses the new threshold throughout. The methodology page documents both definitions and why the second one is the one we will publish against going forward.
The drafters
The list of teams credited in popular coverage with “drafting well” leans heavily on franchises with recent playoff success or famous front-office personalities. Cleveland was usually filed as a dysfunction story until it was credited as an Andrew Berry reclamation project. Pittsburgh, anchored by the same general manager since 2010, is routinely treated as a development model. The list of teams that produced the most 500-snap NFL contributors per pick from 2012 through 2022 is not the list either of those framings would predict.
| # | Team | Hit rate | Picks | Hits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Eagles | 67.50% | 80 | 54 |
| 2 | Ravens | 65.05% | 103 | 67 |
| 3 | Falcons | 64.10% | 78 | 50 |
| 4 | Chiefs | 63.75% | 80 | 51 |
| 5 | Jaguars | 63.22% | 87 | 55 |
Philadelphia leads the league. Across the eleven complete draft classes from 2012 through 2022, 54 of the Eagles’ 80 picks have produced at least one 500-snap regular season, including Fletcher Cox (2012, pick 12), Lane Johnson (2013, pick 4), Jordan Mailata (2018, pick 233), Jalen Hurts (2020, pick 53), and DeVonta Smith (2021, pick 10). Howie Roseman’s record on the metric people argue about most is the cleanest in the league.
The Ravens, behind Eric DeCosta and Ozzie Newsome before him, sit second on the strength of one of the larger pick volumes in the league: 103 selections in the window, 67 of them clearing the new threshold. Atlanta and Kansas City are nearly tied at third and fourth. Jacksonville rounds out a top five that contains exactly one team most fans would call a model franchise.
The bottom of the chart is its own argument. New England finished thirty-second at 47.87 percent, on a Bill Belichick run that ended in 2024. Arizona is thirty-first. Minnesota and the Giants tied near the bottom on a combined 196 picks. The teams the popular conversation tends to call “smart drafting organizations” cluster in the middle of this chart, not the top.
The retainers
The teams credited in popular coverage for “developing players” are mostly not the teams that retain them. The teams credited for “drafting and developing” are mostly teams that produce hits, ship them out, and reload. The cohort retention test asks the colder version of the question: of the players a team drafted and turned into 500-snap contributors between 2017 and 2021, how many are still on the 2025 roster? Five complete classes. The earliest are eight years into the league. The latest are four. They are mature enough to evaluate, recent enough that retention is meaningful, and on average old enough to have hit a second-contract decision.
| # | Team | Cohort retention | Cohort picks on roster / cohort hits |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bills | 54.2% | 13 of 24 |
| 2 | Chiefs | 45.0% | 9 of 20 |
| 3 | Eagles | 32.0% | 8 of 25 |
| 4 | Colts | 32.0% | 8 of 25 |
| 5 | Saints | 31.6% | 6 of 19 |
The Bills lead the league by a wide margin. The 13 retained names are the spine of the current roster: Josh Allen (2018, pick 7), Tre’Davious White (2017, pick 27), Dion Dawkins (2017, pick 63), Matt Milano (2017, pick 163), Ed Oliver (2019, pick 9), Taron Johnson (2018, pick 121), Dawson Knox (2019, pick 96), Greg Rousseau (2021, pick 30), Spencer Brown (2021, pick 93), and a handful of supporting names. Retention is the column where Brandon Beane is the league’s clear leader.
Kansas City sits second. The pattern at the top of this chart is conservative roster building: a Chiefs core drafted around Patrick Mahomes (2017), with the eight cohort survivors anchored by Creed Humphrey (2021, pick 63), Trey Smith (2021, pick 226), Mecole Hardman (2019), and the rest of the Brett Veach mid-decade additions.
The bottom of the cohort retention chart is its own argument.
| # | Team | Cohort retention | Cohort picks on roster / cohort hits |
|---|---|---|---|
| 32 | Rams | 4.2% | 1 of 24 |
| 31 | Seahawks | 4.3% | 1 of 23 |
| 30 | Titans | 11.1% | 2 of 18 |
| 29 | Bears | 11.8% | 2 of 17 |
| 28 | Raiders | 12.0% | 3 of 25 |
The Rams’ number is the cleanest possible quantification of what their front office has been doing. Les Snead drafted 96 picks from 2012 through 2022, hit on 50 of them, and as of 2025 has one of those 2017 through 2021 cohort hits left on the roster. One. Snead traded the rest, in pieces and in packages, for Matthew Stafford, Jalen Ramsey, Von Miller, and the rest of the 2021 roster that won Super Bowl LVI. The “F them picks” approach has been understood as a personality trait. It is a measurable position on a spreadsheet.
The two-team overlap
Cross the drafters chart and the retainers chart. Two teams clear both top fives. Kansas City (fourth in drafting at 63.75 percent, second in cohort retention at 45.0 percent). Philadelphia (first in drafting at 67.5 percent, third in cohort retention at 32.0 percent). The other 28 teams pick one. The Bills lead retention but rank thirteenth in drafting at 59.76 percent. The Falcons rank third in drafting and twentieth in retention at 20.8 percent. The Ravens rank second in drafting and seventh in retention. The Jaguars rank fifth in drafting and twelfth in retention.
The way to read this is not that drafting and keeping are uncorrelated. They are weakly positively correlated, and the correlation runs through the same variables a careful reader would expect: stable front offices, consecutive winning seasons, a franchise quarterback in place during the cohort window. What the chart says is that being top-tier on both at once is rare. Two teams in 32 cleared the bar, and both did it on the strength of a regime that survived the entire window without a structural reset.
Four quadrants
Drafting and keeping read together split the league into four buckets.
Build-and-keep. Top in both. Kansas City and Philadelphia. Both have sat in the top quarter of the league on draft hit rate for the entire window and have spent the cap to retain the players who hit. The Eagles’ second-contract pattern is documented in the team-by-team piece on Roseman.
Build-and-churn. Top in drafting, lower in retention. Atlanta (third in hit rate, twentieth in retention). Jacksonville (fifth in hit rate, twelfth). The Ravens (second in hit rate, seventh in retention). The pattern is enough cap discipline to keep the most important picks and enough volume to absorb the loss of the rest.
Trade-and-develop. Lower draft, higher retention. The Saints (sixth in retention, sixteenth in hit rate). New Orleans drafts a smaller cohort and keeps a higher share of it. The Colts (fourth in retention at 32.0 percent, twenty-first in hit rate at 54.95 percent). Both organizations operate on a smaller, longer-tenured roster core.
Sinking. Bottom in both. The Rams (twenty-sixth in hit rate, last in retention). Seattle (twenty-fourth in hit rate, thirty-first in retention). The Bears, Titans, and Raiders all sit in the bottom five of retention on draft records that did not produce enough cohort hits to compensate. The Patriots sit thirty-second in hit rate at 47.87 percent (45 of 94), the only team below 50 percent across the eleven-year window. Bill Belichick’s last six classes drove most of that decline. The new Mike Vrabel regime is starting from a homegrown roster floor that no other AFC East team is working from.
Worth noting where the Bills sit. Buffalo’s draft hit rate of 59.76 percent is in the middle of the pack at thirteenth, but the cohort retention number is the league’s best by nine percentage points. The Bills are not in the build-and-keep quadrant the way Kansas City and Philadelphia are. They are something more specific: a keep-and-keep organization that drafts at league-average volume and turns an unusually high share of those picks into long-term roster anchors. The team-by-team scorecard for Brandon Beane is the next read.
A few teams sit in interesting places between quadrants. The 49ers (twelfth in drafting, ninth in retention) are the cleanest example of an organization just outside the top five on both. San Francisco produced 60 hits on 100 picks for the window and retained 8 of 29 cohort hits at 27.6 percent. The Lions (eleventh in drafting at 60 percent, seventeenth in retention at 24 percent) are the closest active example of a sinking-to-rising trajectory: the cohort retention number reflects the bottom of the rebuild, while the recent classes (Sewell 2021, Hutchinson 2022, ARSB 2022) reset the homegrown core. Reading the data forward, both teams are positioned to enter the build-and-keep tier within two cycles if their current cap windows hold.
How this extends prior work
Josh Dubow’s AP retention piece in September 2025 ranked teams using a binary roster snapshot of the 2021 through 2024 draft classes. Cincinnati, Kansas City, and Detroit topped that list. SIS published a four-year retention table in April 2026 focused on first-rounders. We extend the window back to 2012 for hit rate, hold the 2017 through 2021 cohort separate so it can be evaluated against full second-contract decisions, and read both numbers alongside the drafting side. The full methodology table is at /methodology.
The threshold matters here. At a 100-snap line, the Browns appear top-five in drafting, the Eagles appear paradoxical because their hit rate looks elite while their cohort retention looks middling, and most of the middle of the chart is compressed into a 10-point band that hides real differences in how organizations are built. At 500 snaps, Cleveland slides to sixteenth, the Eagles emerge as the league’s clearest example of doing both well, and the spread between the best and worst drafters opens to almost 20 points. The new threshold separates teams that produce contributors from teams that produce roster bodies. It is the line we will publish against going forward.
The counterpoint
Cohort retention rewards stable rosters. A team that drafted four hits in 2018 and re-signed all four lands higher than a team that drafted ten in the same span and kept five. The denominator is total cohort hits, not contract-decision-eligible ones. A team like the Eagles, which drafted heavily and produced a large cohort, will register a lower retention rate than a team that drafted lean and re-signed every survivor. That bias works in the Saints’ and Colts’ favor and against Philadelphia and Baltimore.
The bigger frame matters too. Roster construction is bigger than the draft. The model the Rams ran from 2017 through 2022 traded away the cohort to win a Super Bowl. The model the Saints have run kept a smaller draft yield. Both are visible in this data. Neither is wrong, and the four-quadrant frame above does not crown one as the right answer. It surfaces the choice each front office is making.
What’s next
A Bills deep-dive on the league-leading cohort retention number is the first scorecard in the series. The Eagles piece, which used to be framed as a paradox, has been rewritten now that the higher threshold dissolves the paradox: Roseman drafts the league’s best class and keeps a third of the contributors, both top-three numbers and a build-and-keep regime by every measure that survives the threshold change.
Each of the 32 team pieces uses the same four cuts on the data documented above and at /methodology. The point of running every team through the same definitions is to make the comparisons honest. The drafters chart and the retainers chart have only two overlapping names because being top-tier on both at once is hard. The differences are visible only when the same metric is applied across all 32 front offices in the same window, and only when the threshold for “hit” is set at the line that separates rotational contributors from roster bodies. Read the Eagles next.