The incredible disappearing non-Power Five NFL Draft prospect

The number of top NFL Draft picks from the Group of Five, FCS and beyond are dwindling. What's going on?

There was no shortage of ways to analyze (and over-analyze) the 2024 NFL Draft.

A record six quarterbacks went in the first 12 picks, speaking to the prioritization of the position and the rush to find a potential franchise savior while also signaling what much of the league thinks of next year’s crop of signal-callers. Michigan led all schools with 13 draftees and provided yet another data point that the Wolverines’ 2023 national championship team was pretty good. And, in a spring tradition unlike any other, teams were assigned draft grades based on players who are still more than four months away from logging their first NFL snap.

Through a more college-centric lens, there was one other thing that stood out from the three-day extravaganza in Detroit. It wasn’t about where the draft’s top picks came from; it was where they didn’t.

The draft featured just one first-round pick from outside the Power Five conferences – Toledo cornerback Quinyon Mitchell, who went No. 22 overall to the Philadelphia Eagles – and just two non-Power Five prospects total in the draft’s first two rounds.

It’s not just a one-year aberration, either. 

The outlook for players from programs outside the sport’s upper crust was even bleaker during the 2023 NFL Draft, with no players from the Group of Five conferences, the Football Championship Subdivision or any lower level of college football going in the first round and just two such prospects going in the second round. The first player from that group of colleges wasn’t selected until the No. 48 overall pick, the deepest in the draft it has gone in at least the past 20 years.

As college football consolidates power in such a way that one of the sport’s major conferences will cease to exist in a couple of months, it’s natural to wonder if the NFL Draft is simply the latest byproduct of the widening gap between the haves and the have nots.

The numbers behind the Power Five’s increased NFL Draft presence

A player like Mitchell didn’t used to be such an outlier. If anything, the spot in which he was selected would have been unusually low for a player from outside the Power Five or even the Mid-American Conference specifically.

In eight of a possible 10 NFL Drafts from 2013 through 2022, a player from outside college football’s major conferences was taken off the board within the draft’s first 10 picks. That stretch began with Eric Fisher of Central Michigan going to the Kansas City Chiefs with the No. 1 overall pick in 2013. As recently as 2021, two of the first three picks in the draft were from non-Power Five programs.

It shouldn’t be surprising. Over the past decade alone, Group of Five schools have produced the likes of Josh Allen, Khalil Mack, Sauce Gardner, Ed Oliver and Haason Reddick, among many others, the kinds of players who have gone on to enjoy stardom and riches in the NFL. All of them were first-round picks.

Indeed, a player from the Group of Five, FCS or some rung of college football below that going in the draft’s first two rounds didn’t used to be some novelty, a heart-warming story of an undervalued prospect overcoming considerable odds to be regarded as one of the best talents available. It was an expectation.