2020 NFL Draft: Which positions hold best value for Kansas City Chiefs?

For the 2020 NFL Draft the Kansas City Chiefs may want to look at recent history to see what positions have offered the best value where they are drafting.

We are less than two weeks away from the 2020 NFL Draft. With the Kansas City Chiefs recently re-signing cornerback Bashaud Breeland, it’s hard to make an argument that the team has to target any one specific position with their first round pick this year. Because of this, there is a wider range of positions being discussed for the Chiefs in the first round than in a typical year this close to the draft.

With many positions still on the table, it has led to some debate amongst fans as to what positions should get a higher priority and which positions could potentially wait for a round or two to address. For instance, I am one of those fans that believes its foolish to spend a first round draft pick on a running back. Others believe selecting one of the best backs in this draft with their first pick could make an elite offense unstoppable.

When debating these type of scenarios, one of my main points is always that its easier to hit on a great running back in the mid rounds than it is other positions. It seems wasteful to me to use your most valuable pick on a back when you could use it on a position like cornerback, where the odds of landing a quality starter are less likely later in the draft.

While I believe those things to be true, I wanted to see if recent draft results actually backed that theory up. I decided to go over the results of recent drafts and look at how the talent dropped off at some positions frequently discussed for the Chiefs.

I also wanted to try and look for results specifically where the Chiefs first pick will be, so I went back and looked at all the players drafted at certain positions between picks 25-48. That’s the last quarter of the first round and first half of the second round. I included the top of the second round to get a few more players in the results to help the sample size, and to cover a potential trade back (which I think most fans will agree that the Chiefs would prefer to do). Then I compared that group of players with the players at the same position taken in the third round of those drafts.

I chose the third round because I really wanted to see how soon the talent dropped off. The third round is still within the top 100 picks. However, the question is: how quickly some positions drop off on elite talent sooner than others? I ended up using NFL.com’s draft tracker to look at the picks and they currently have the last six drafts (dating back to 2014) loaded in the tracker. So that was my sample size, the last six drafts (2014-2019).

Finally, I looked at how many players from each group are still in the NFL, how many started at least one game last year, and how many have made at least one Pro Bowl.

Let’s start our comparison with the position that has been at the top of my wish list for months now, the cornerbacks.