Tide, UGA lead school picks; SEC top conference again … To absolutely no one’s surprise, Alabama and Georgia had the most players selected by any school at this weekend’s 2023 draft. In the end, 10 players from each school were selected this weekend, although neither school had a particularly dominant individual year as Georgia did last year and the Tide the previous draft. Indeed, the two SEC powers just edged out Michigan which had 9 players selected, while national runner-up TCU had 8 and a half dozen plus colleges including Ohio State, Penn State, Florida, Clemson, Oregon, Pittsburgh and LSU had 6 players taken apiece.J
Also to absolutely no one’s surprise, the SEC once again had the most players of any conference selected at the 2023 draft. Indeed, it was the 17th straight year in which the SEC led the way, although it was a lot closer this year than in some recent draft. Overall, led by Alabama and Georgia’s 10 picks apiece, the SEC had 62 players taken at this weekend’s draft, although that was down slightly from their record 65 totals in the previous two years. At the same time, the Big Ten had 55 players taken this year, up 7 from last year and just 7 picks behind the SEC. In fact, we probably don’t need a whole lot more data to prove that the SEC and Big Ten are in fact emerging as two super conferences as the other leagues were well back this weekend. The ACC, for example, was next in line with just 33 picks, while the Big XII had 29 and the PAC-12 27 with the non-power 5 conferences even further behind. The AAC had just 10 picks this year, while the Sun Belt had 9, the MAC 7, the mountain West had 5 and CUSA had three.
In fact, the big story at the 2023 draft, at least from the college competitiveness perspective was just how dominant the bigger schools were. The SEC and Big Ten, for example, accounted for 45% of all players selected this year. Overall, 80% of picks this year were from Power 5 conferences and almost 95% were FBS players. In contrast, there were just 12 players selected this year from FCS or DII schools and no school outside the FBS ranks had more than one player selected this year. And the FCS/DII total was just half the figure it was in 2022 when 23 players came from outside the ranks of FBS programs. Maybe the only modicum of solace for the smaller schools is the fact that their first player taken – North Dakota State OT Cody Mauch who was selected 48th overall by Tampa Bay – was relatively early for a non-FBS player to be chosen and that 4 of their 12 selections came in the first two days. Heck, even the 7th round, which used to be the place where teams tended to take a flyer on smaller school players, was dominated by the Power 5 schools. Indeed, 27 of the 42 players selected in the final round (64%) were from Power 5 conferences, while only 5 (12%) came from non-FBS programs.
