The NFL draft is a crapshoot, 2020 edition

Many fans of NFL teams expect their general managers to hit on a large fraction of their draft picks. When someone on Twitter praises their team’s first round pick for playing well, you can expect responses to the effect of, “He’s supposed to play well, he’s a first round pick.”

But the reality is nowhere close to this. Tuesday was the deadline for the fifth-year options of Round 1 picks from the 2020 class to be exercised or declined by their teams. And here are the sobering results, courtesy of Over The Cap:

Of the 32 first-rounders, only 12 had their fifth year options exercised or their contracts extended (denoted by a *).