Why Smart People Make Dumb Draft Picks — and What Your Organization Can Learn From It

The NFL draft dust has settled, and cue the annual "did they really just do that?" season. As reliably as the draft itself, the internet is now awash with takes on the head-scratching choices made by otherwise seemingly sentient football folks. The general vibe often lands somewhere between a chuckle and a bewildered "only in the NFL."

But hold your horses before you chalk this up to the NFL being the NFL. The very same tangled webs of incentives and biases that lead to those eyebrow-raising draft trades and picks are alive and well in your organization. The NFL draft, with its glaring media spotlight and ticking clock, just happens to be a wonderfully dramatic, high-stakes petri dish for observing organizational behavior and the often-irrational world of behavioral economics.

For the uninitiated, the NFL draft is where the best college talent gets divvied up among the 32 teams each spring. The idea is elegantly simple: the team that stunk the most gets first dibs, the second-stinkiest gets second, and so on. This, in theory, helps the less-than-stellar teams get better and keeps the league competitive. However, like kids trading Pokémon cards, NFL teams can trade these precious draft slots. So, a team at pick five might wheel and deal with a team at ten, often snagging an extra pick or two later in the draft, or in a future draft, as a sweetener.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. Back in '05, Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler and fellow economist Cade Massey dropped a truth bomb of a study showing that teams would be smarter playing the draft lottery by trading down for more picks instead of chasing those elusive top slots. Turns out, those coveted early selections aren't the guaranteed path to long-term glory folks often think, and loading up on more chances later on, is statistically the sharper move.

If I know about this study, trust me, every single NFL team knows about this study in much more detail than me. Thaler and Massey have even graced NFL war rooms, dispensing their draft wisdom. Many teams have their own number-crunching gurus and still bring in outside experts. Yet, year after year, we see teams inexplicably trading up, making decisions that seem to thumb their nose at cold, hard economic logic.

Why the persistent defiance of reason? Well, spoiler alert: it’s not just a football thing. The root causes will likely sound eerily familiar to anyone who's ever been part of a team trying to achieve, well, anything – from launching the next big product to just trying to get everyone on the same page for the quarterly report.

At the core of this beautiful chaos? Incentives. Sure, the party line in the draft room is "let's make this team better!" But peel back a layer or two, and you'll find those ideas on how to achieve that "better" start to get delightfully…squishy.

Fear, that delightful motivator, looms large. Take the General Manager (GM), the supposed grown-up in charge of personnel and draft day decisions. Theoretically, they're all about long-term team success. But in the real world, most GMs are on a tight leash – they maybe have two or three seasons to make a splash, or it’s time to find another job. This naturally nudges them towards the shiny, immediate-impact prospects, even if a slower-burn player might offer more sustained value down the road. What good are two picks next year to the GM who won't have a job next year? It's the organizational equivalent of grabbing the low-hanging fruit because you're worried about the ladder collapsing.

Fear, in fact, is a powerful undercurrent in any organizational quest. While performance expectations are part of the deal, when the terror of screwing up or missing short-term targets takes over, you get a parade of choices that sacrifice long-term gains for short-term CYA maneuvers. The most effective teams (and companies) are often led by those who can navigate this tension, fostering a safe environment where both short-term actions and ambitious long-term vision can coexist and drive sustainable success.

Then comes the delightful clash of domain expertise. The GM isn't alone in that draft room. They've got the Head Coach, a gaggle of assistant coaches (each with their offensive, defensive, and even hyper-specific positional pet projects), and the scouts, whose job it is to unearth and analyze talent. Each one comes with their own well-honed biases, shaped by years spent in their particular football trenches. Of course, the defensive coordinator is going to be salivating over that potential shutdown cornerback, even if it means mortgaging future draft picks.

This, again, is a carbon copy of organizational life. Every company has its engineering teams, sales teams, marketing teams, and product teams, each with their own deeply held beliefs about the "right" way to solve a problem, informed by their specific expertise. This isn't a flaw; it's the very reason they're on the payroll. The magic lies in leadership's ability to orchestrate these diverse perspectives, guiding them toward solutions that champion the organization's overarching goals, rather than just a single department's agenda.

And let's not forget the wonderfully human element of personal motivations. What's that? You think everyone involved is purely driven by the selfless pursuit of team glory? Bless your heart. Take our defensive coordinator, still dreaming of that game-changing defensive stud. A lights-out defense doesn't just help the team; it makes them look like a genius. Even if the offense is stuck in the mud, a dominant defense can lead to personal accolades and, who knows, maybe even a head coaching gig down the line when the current guy gets the boot for, you know, having a mediocre offense. These personal aspirations are always lurking in the decision-making shadows in places no one likes to talk about.

This is product life in a nutshell. Whether we like it or not, every member of a team has their own set of drivers, a mix of personal and professional ambitions that aren't always perfectly aligned. Maybe the design team wants to create something visually stunning for their portfolio, while the engineers are sweating about future technical debt. Perhaps the sales team has privately made promises to clients that are about to collide spectacularly with the product roadmap. I once worked on a project where it turned out that some of team members' bonuses were tied to a metric that actively undermined the project's ultimate goal. A savvy leader has to be part psychologist and part detective, sussing out these hidden agendas and gently nudging everyone towards the common good.

So, at the end of the day, while it's easy for us armchair quarterbacks (pun intended) to scoff at the seemingly nonsensical draft-day drama and label it as a uniquely football folly, a slightly less cynical gaze reveals a familiar landscape. The same messy mix of incentives, biases, and personal ambitions that leads to those head-scratching draft picks is bubbling beneath the surface of countless organizational endeavors.

And just like in the NFL, where no team is perfect on draft day, no organization achieves flawless decision-making. There will always be risks that look foolish in hindsight and choices that simply don't pan out. But in the grand scheme of things, the consistently successful NFL teams – like the consistently successful organizations – are the ones with leaders who can navigate those murky waters, balancing the competing drives of stakeholders to make decisions that deliver both short-term wins and enduring long-term value. And that, more often than not, leads to a lot more victories than defeats.