For the 5th time in the past 10 years (previously 2023, 2022, 2019, and 2014), above is the NFL Draft Visit list from Walter Football organized by team and position. The numbers shaded in blue are conditionally formatted to show what position the team is concentrating on compared to other positions, those shaded in red are formatted to show what position each team is focusing on compared to other teams in the NFL.
This year I kept the same draft visit points system as last year:
- Visits worth 1 point = visits where the teams were already there and just talked to a player = Senior Bowl visit, NFL Combine visit, virtual visit
- Visits worth 2 points = visits where the team sought out the player, but in a group setting = Pro Day visit, Local visits (players that grew up or went to college in the area)
- Visits worth 3 points = individual visits where the player was brought in or worked out, often the most important = Private visits (teams have 30 of these to use), Workout visits
One difference this year is instead of displaying the sum total of the amount of draft visit points per team per position, I chose to display the percentage proportion of that team's total draft visit points used (what I call NFL Draft Visit Resources). The reasoning is simple: even if not every visit is reported, what IS reported should be consistent within the team.
For example, if a team reports their visits often, it's likely that the reported visits are consistent across positions within that team, meaning we should be able to see what positions they're spending more resources on (resources in this case effectively mean time). Every team only has a certain amount of time pre-draft, and it's my theory that they allocate this time as efficiently and effectively as they believe they can.
Please keep in mind that this list is in no way complete, as these are only the visits that teams/agents/players have reported that Walter Football thankfully organizes every year. There are likely many prospect visits that are not reported (for various team reasons) or not collected in the list. Also, some teams definitely report their visits A LOT more, there are some local newspapers/blogs that report a lot more, and there's certain players whose agents report more, etc. (For example: the data on Los Angeles Rams visits is pretty sparse, whereas the data on Pittsburgh Steelers visits is pretty robust. See the linked spreadsheet at the bottom for visit info)
Even though the data isn't 100% accurate, I believe it's still useful to look for trends on maybe what teams are concentrating on what positions. And I believe it'll be useful to similarly-minded mock draft nerds like myself. Happy mock drafting!
Link: Spreadsheet with data (keep in mind it was put together in 3 hours so only basic data verification/cleaning was done)