Methodology | The 53 Report

Data sources

All data is public. Joins, time-series alignment, and snap-weighting are ours.

Since 1980

Draft picks

Every selection from 1980 to present, sourced from Pro-Football-Reference and nflverse.

Since 2002

Weekly rosters

Active and injured-reserve status by week, sourced from nflverse.

Since 2012

Snap counts

Per-game offensive and defensive snap participation, sourced from Pro-Football-Reference.

Storage: SQLite, ~1.3M rows. Source data and derivations live on github.com/pete-builds.

Definitions

Retention: A player is retained in year N if they were rostered for at least one regular-season week of that team. Snap-weighted retention multiplies that by the player's share of team snaps, so a contributor counts for more than a practice-squad call-up. The drafting team is the team that originally selected the player; trades reset the clock.
Drafting output: A team's draft output is the cumulative snap share earned by its drafted players in their first four NFL seasons, weighted by pick value (Jimmy Johnson chart, normalized). Pro Bowl and All-Pro selections are tracked separately and reported but not used in the headline ranking.
Time window: Where the data supports it, we report rolling 12-year windows (2012 to current season). For pre-2012 work, snap counts are unavailable; we fall back to roster presence and games played. Pre-2002 work uses season-end roster only.
Position weighting: A starting left tackle staying for five years is not the same as a seventh-round special-teamer staying for two. Where relevant, we report position-weighted retention using snap share within position group. The unweighted version is always available alongside.
Snap thresholds: "Contributor" is defined as a player with ≥20% of their team's offensive or defensive snaps in a given week. "Starter" is ≥50%. Special-teams snaps are tracked separately and not included in the contributor threshold.

The GM scorecard

The series grades general managers on a four-column rubric. Every scorecard article on this site uses the same definitions, so a B+ on one team's position construction means the same thing on another's.

01

Hit rate

Share of the GM's draft picks that crossed the 500-snap line in a regular season, the threshold for a player who justified the pick by becoming a real rotational contributor. Compared to the league baseline for the same window so a GM is not penalized for drafting in a high or low era.

02

Retention

Share of those picks still on the current 53-man roster, reported both raw and snap-weighted. Snap weighting prevents a practice-squad call-up from counting the same as a starter.

03

Position construction

Distribution of homegrown players across position groups, read against the team's apparent identity. A defense-first identity carried by the GM's drafted defenders scores higher than one carried by free agents.

04

The franchise pick

The single bet that defines the regime, usually the quarterback. Did it hit? What does the rest of the scorecard look like if it didn't? A regime built around a missed franchise pick reads differently from the same draft record around a hit.

Each column gets a letter sub-grade. The final grade is a holistic synthesis of the four, not an arithmetic average. Process scores over outcomes: a GM with no Super Bowl can still grade A if the four columns hold.

Grade-eligibility starts at three completed drafts. New GMs and interim hires are written up in narrative form without a final letter until they have enough draft cohorts to grade fairly.

Article shapes

Three shapes, one dataset, one set of definitions.

Scorecard

The full grade

A tenured GM graded across the four columns above with a final letter.

Grading Brandon Beane → Narrative

A paradox or anomaly

Worth its own piece. Named players, an explicit counterpoint, no final letter.

The Eagles record → Methodology

League-wide framing

A methodological cut across all 32 teams. No team focus.

Two teams clear both bars →

Hit rate (article-level)

For team-level draft hit-rate stories, we use a binary threshold: a draft pick is a hit if the player produced 500 or more offensive, defensive, or special-teams snaps in any single regular season of their career. The 500-snap line is roughly one season of meaningful rotational playing time (about 30 snaps per game across a 17-game schedule). It separates players who justified the pick from players who only made the roster.

Note: hit (single-season snap milestone) and contributor (weekly snap share, defined above) are different concepts. Articles use both, with the definitions on this page. When an article calls a player a "500-snap NFL contributor," it means the player crossed the hit threshold; the contributor language is the reader-facing version of the same metric.

Drafts within the last three years are excluded by default, since players from those classes are still in their development window and would skew the rate. The same threshold applies to every team, so the cross-team comparisons are like-for-like.

Comparison to prior published work

Two pieces have published team-level draft retention or related work in the last twelve months. We extend both with wider time coverage, snap-level granularity, and open data. The table below maps the differences directly.

Methodology comparison: prior art vs The 53 Report
Aspect	Dubow / AP (2025)	SIS (2026)	The 53 Report
Time window	2021–2024 (4 years)	4-year endpoint, since 2016	1980+ picks; 2002+ rosters; 2012+ snaps
Retention metric	On active roster or IR after cutdowns (binary)	Players still on team after fourth year	Snap-weighted retention, multi-year, all CBA eras
Data source	Sportradar	Not stated publicly	nflverse / Pro-Football-Reference (open)
Position weighting	No	Yes (positional value, R1 only)	Yes
Draft capital weighting	Day groups (R1 / R2-3 / R4-7)	R1 only	Pick-level (Jimmy Johnson chart)
Open data	No	No	Yes. Full SQLite, MIT.

Read Josh Dubow's AP piece (Sept 2025) · Read the SIS positional value study (April 2026)

Reproducibility

Every published article links to the exact query that produced its findings. The repository contains a notebook for each headline metric. If you find a methodology question we haven't answered here, tell us: [email protected].

Updates

2026-05-01
Hit threshold raised from 100 to 500 snaps. All three published articles rewritten against the new threshold. League baseline drops from ~85% to ~57%; rankings shift accordingly. Old 100-snap metric remains in the database for comparison.
2026-04-29
Methodology page consolidated around GM Performance Grading. The four-column rubric (hit rate, retention, position construction, the franchise pick) became canonical. Three article shapes (scorecard, narrative, methodology) named explicitly.
2026-04-25
Site launched with the methodology piece and Eagles narrative. Initial dataset: 1980+ picks, 2002+ rosters, 2012+ snaps in SQLite.