University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Statistics Papers Wharton Faculty Research 10-2014 Predicting the Draft and Career Success of Tight Ends in the National Football League Jason Mulholland University of Pennsylvania Shane T. Jensen University of Pennsylvania Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/statistics_papers Part of the Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons Recommended Citation Mulholland, J., & Jensen, S. T. (2014). Predicting the Draft and Career Success of Tight Ends in the National Football League. Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, 10 (4), 381-396. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1515/jqas-2013-0134 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/statistics_papers/54 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Predicting the Draft and Career Success of Tight Ends in the National Football League Abstract National Football League teams have complex drafting strategies based on college and combine performance that are intended to predict success in the NFL. In this paper, we focus on the tight end position, which is seeing growing importance as the NFL moves towards a more passing-oriented league. We create separate prediction models for 1. the NFL Draft and 2. NFL career performance based on data available prior to the NFL Draft: college performance, the NFL combine, and physical measures. We use linear regression and recursive partitioning decision trees to predict both NFL draft order and NFL career success based on this pre-draft data. With both modeling approaches, we find that the measures that are most predictive of NFL draft order are not necessarily the most predictive measures of NFL career success.