*NSFL's Best Earning Draft Class

[Amidships]

Hello everyone and welcome to my first ever NSFL media post. I have to admit it took me a fair amount of time to find a topic that both interested me enough to gather and analyze data and would also be worth submitting for all two or three of you to read. A few days ago I was having a conversation with Sylphreni in the Tijuana locker room regarding our respective TPE counts, when I remembered a discussion I’d had with a DSFL scout before the season 22 DSFL draft. I had made it known to all of the scouts that my early goal was to hit the DSFL TPE cap by the time the season 23 NSFL draft rolled around. One scout in particular mentioned to me that he only knew of one other recent player to have reached this goal. It stuck out to me at the time, because I was on pace to make it and I didn’t see myself as an outlier. During my conversation with Sylphreni, we did some quick math and determined that we were both likely to exceed the cap by draft time. After looking at the season 23 draft class, it looked more like the top five or possibly more would likely hit the cap. It brought me back to that conversation with the DSFL scout. I had to find out. How many players have hit the cap by the time their draft rolled around?

I used the draft signature threads to gather my data; originally I started out trying to find a way to easily scrape the data, but it doesn’t appear that this information has been compiled before. Unfortunately, it would have to be all done by hand. There was data all the way back to Season 11, but I figured an eleven season sample would be enough. Season 12 is also the oldest season with more than one remaining player in the league. I also wanted to compare the Season 23 class, but there are still a few missing updates preventing a proper comparison. (The Season 23 updates appear to be completed, so I have added another section at the bottom that has temporary data for Season 23.) I intend to do a follow up where I compare the Season 23 class to this study; and since the data is available I’ll probably also include the Season 11 class.

In the past eleven seasons, only five total players have hit the DSFL TPE cap before their respective NSFL draft began.

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One player in each of the last two seasons has managed to reach their maximum DSFL potential. Before these two, there was a three season drought where no one was able to hit the cap. In Season 17 there were two players who managed to hit the cap; this was the only instance where more than one player was able to do so. The earliest player in the sample was one year before, in Season 16.

So who are these players?

[div align=\\\"center\\\"]Season 16 - Cornerback Dermot Lavelle Jr. at 259 TPE, user White Cornerback
Season 17 - Running Back Ashley Owens at 267 TPE, user run_CMC
Season 17 - Cornerback Jordan Andrews at 250 TPE, user RaiderNation
Season 21 - Safety Prince Vegeta at 259 TPE, user jeffie43
Season 22 - Defensive Tackle Phat Boi at 259 TPE, user BadLck[/div]

Two of these players are the second for their respective users, but even more impressive is the other three who managed to hit the cap on their first player. Four of the five hold jobs within the league showing that on top of being excellent earners they contribute to the league in other ways. Without diving too deep into the individual earnings of each player, it is safe to say that these users have impressive earning ability. I intend to do another followup to this article where I explore these players further and see if they’ve continued to earn at their incredible starting pace.

From here, I decided I already had the data so I might as well do some further investigation into the earning of these classes as a whole. Which classes have earned the most in their first year in the DSFL?

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Originally, I assumed that earlier season players may have lower values due to fewer opportunities to gain TPE. Obviously the bigger classes dominate total TPE earned, but if we look into the TPE earned per player we can actually find an interesting story.

[div align=\\\"center\\\"]S19 - 131.91 TPE per Player
S16 - 129.52 TPE per Player
S12 - 129.20 TPE per Player
S13 - 125.20 TPE per Player
S15 - 119.55 TPE per Player
S21 - 117.20 TPE per Player
S20 - 109.82 TPE per Player
S17 - 108.10 TPE per Player
S22 - 101.52 TPE per Player
S14 - 100.88 TPE per Player

(+0) S19 - 150.81 TPE per Player EMT
(+8) S18 - 147.08 TPE per Player EMT
(+2) S15 - 144.62 TPE per Player EMT
(-1) S12 - 136.09 TPE per Player EMT
(-3) S16 - 135.41 TPE per Player EMT
(+0) S21 - 131.39 TPE per Player EMT
(+0) S20 - 130.45 TPE per Player EMT
(-4) S13 - 128.33 TPE per Player EMT
(-1) S17 - 126.67 TPE per Player EMT
(+0) S14 - 114.26 TPE per Player EMT[/div]

Season 19 is the clear leader for best jump start boasting a huge 131.91 TPE per player at draft time. This class has several well known names helping prop it up in Nokazoa, scorycory, iamslm22, and RainDelay. Looking back, even if we exclude the 50 TPE players there are only five players in the class below one hundred TPE. With such a small class, it’s likely easier for the players to get help and earn better than some of the larger classes. It could also simply be that this season’s players are quick learners that managed to catch on and improve quickly.

The class with the lowest average in the study is Season 14, which was another incredibly small class. It looks like several of these players joined later in the season, and with only 24 total players it’s difficult for the top earners to pull the rest of the class up. If we exclude the brand new players without an update, this class still shows a respectable 114.26 TPE.

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I applied my own pseudo scientific clustering algorithm to determine the various tiers for the classes in my study which show how the classes relate to each other. As mentioned above, it’s clear that Season 19 is the best class in the study by far. What’s more interesting is that when we remove the newly created players, Season 19 is so much better than anyone else that they find themselves alone in the first tier. This class earned so incredibly well early on; it makes me excited for my next study where I plan to see where these classes are now.

Conversely, Season 14 got off to such a slow start, that they made up their own fifth tier. Looking at the data reveals that only two of the players in this class managed to exceed two hundred TPE by draft time. Despite the big names drafted this year, there was very little TPE earned early on. Several of these players are still active and contributing to their teams, so it will be interesting to see how much better this class did throughout their careers compared to their first full year.

Averaging each season’s position with and without newly created players, the final ranking is as follows:

[div align=\\\"center\\\"]Season 19
Season 16
Season 12
Season 15
Season 18
Season 13
Season 21
Season 20
Season 17
Season 22
Season 14[/div]

With the updates being posted yesterday, I managed to quickly gather the Season 23 stats to compare at the end of this article.

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Season 23 nearly doubles the amount of players to have hit the cap in this study. With four total players to hit the cap, it is by far the most of any other season. One thing to note, however, is that when you exclude newly created players, Season 17 had a higher percentage of players hitting the cap than Season 23.

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Going further if we compare the total class to the rest of the classes in the study, we see that the Season 23 is the deepest class in terms of TPE gained in the past 12 seasons. The average player in the Season 23 class has an enormous 145.83 TPE, and if we exclude newly created players, it comes to 154.85. This is an incredibly huge number that I expect to decrease as there will be more players created before the draft, but between the players who hit the cap and the above average class size it is apparent that the Season 23 class has the potential to be one of the deepest draft classes the league has seen yet.


Data can be found here: NSFL Best Earning Classes

[Frostbite]

In s21 they were missing about 2-3 weeks worth of trivia and PTs in the claim thread

[Amidships]

In s21 they were missing about 2-3 weeks worth of trivia and PTs in the claim thread

With three of you at 241 in that class, there's a very high likelihood that you'd have all hit 250 as well. That's extremely unfortunate!




Also, my rankings are based solely on the data and completely disregard reasons like this. I fully expect there to be similar stories for several of the classes. I may go back and analyze the update threads from the top earners to see what was claimed and when. That's a lot more data collection, though, and after gathering the info above I wasn't feeling up to doing much more by hand, haha.

[Frostbite]

yeah, grading is different with each class, but that would be a ton of data lmao.

This is still a great article tho

[retrospace111]

s22 best 22

[Starboy]

In s21 they were missing about 2-3 weeks worth of trivia and PTs in the claim thread

I capped with that but it was the weekend the draft happened so I didn’t technically cap like normal

[moonlight]

S15 gang

[goodfortunecoffee]

Sorry i read it through but what does EMT mean?

[C9Van]

Christ season 16 sucks.

[Amidships]

Sorry i read it through but what does EMT mean?

I realized after the fact that I never explicitly stated that anywhere, sorry!

EMT = Excluding Minimum TPE; this means anyone who was at 50 TPE on their draft card, so they hadn't submitted anything yet or missed the update time frame.