NFL Draft 2026 — what our model got right, what it missed

Round 1 of the 2026 NFL Draft happened Thursday April 23. We posted model picks publicly on every Round 1 selection that had a tradeable market. Two days later, the dust has settled, books have paid (or held), and we have the data to be honest about which calls were edges and which were noise.

This post is the hand-graded post-mortem. Every pick links to the original /verify-pick permalink with the SHA-256 hash and closing snapshot. Nothing on this page is editable after the fact.

We did this for two reasons. First, ship 6 of our current sprint argued every AI picks product owes the public a four-number stack — sample size, CLV, vig-adjusted ROI, hit rate — instead of marketing the rosy ones. We can't make that argument and then quietly skip our own post-mortems. Second, the NFL Draft is a single-event slate where the model edge is high-leverage but also small-sample, and that's exactly the case where dishonest review is most tempting.

The four-number stack on the slate

Round 1 settled positions 1 through 32 at 41 model-tradeable markets (1.28 markets/pick on average; some picks had clean over-on-pick-number plus a side prop, others had only one usable line). Of those 41:

• Settled W/L: 23 wins, 16 losses, 2 pushes
• Hit rate: 59.0% (23 / 39 settled excluding pushes)
• Raw ROI: +6.3% over 41u risked
• Vig-adjusted ROI (basis: closing_line, n=37 with closing snapshot): +2.1%
• CLV avg: +0.8%
• Sample note: small sample (39 settled), directional signal only — not statistically meaningful for a single-event slate

That's a positive ex-vig ROI on a small sample. Honest reading: we cleared the juice on the Round, but the variance band on 39 picks is wide enough that a flat coin flip could have produced this. The CLV being barely positive at +0.8% is the real story — the model didn't beat the closing line decisively. The hit-rate number flatters.

Picks 1 through 5: the four we want to defend in detail

#1 — Mendoza (Indianapolis) — model: O 0.5 first QB taken at -110 — graded WIN

The Mendoza-at-1 model-vs-market gap was our largest of the night at +12 cents. Our model gave 64% to "Mendoza first QB taken"; market opened at 51% (-104). We hit at 64% true probability, market closed at 60%. Closing line moved toward us. Clean cash, clean +CLV. Receipts: pick_hash chain at /verify-pick.

Lesson: when our model has 13+ cents on a binary side and the market starts moving toward us pre-event, the edge is usually real. We saw it again on Bailey-OL-second (+9 cents at close, hit) and Mendoza-floor-2.5 (+11 cents, hit).

#2 — Bailey (Cleveland, OL) — model: O 1.5 OL taken in top-3 at -150 — graded LOSS

Cleveland took Bailey first OL at #2 as expected. Our model called for 2 OL in the top-3 at 71% (-150). Atlanta at #3 took DT Cooper instead. Lost.

The honest post-mortem: we underweighted Atlanta's defensive-need signal. Our positional-need score for the Falcons keyed on left-tackle replacement (correctly, market consensus agreed pre-Draft), but we missed that GM Ritter's tape-watch pattern over the prior month had shifted toward DT after the Onyema retirement. Our pre-Draft model had Atlanta at 67% OL / 26% DT. Post-pick, the smarter prior would have been 41% OL / 49% DT — the GM-tape-pattern signal was strong enough to flip favored.

This is the kind of miss that's easy to wave away ("we got 2/3 on the top-3 OL"), but when you're laying -150 you needed both legs. The 71% prior was overconfident. Going forward, the GM-tape-pattern signal feeds at a higher weight in the OL-stack model.

#3 — Cooper (Atlanta, DT) — model: U 17.5 draft position at +130 — graded LOSS

Symmetric miss to Bailey. Our model had Cooper going in the back half of round 1 with 58% probability. Atlanta at #3 was a 4% prior. Closing line moved sharply against us at +95 from +130. CLV -15%. Honest read: the model just didn't see this coming, and the market — to its credit — did partly catch up before posting close.

Lesson: when our model and market disagree by more than 30 cents on a draft-position prop, the honest call is to abstain rather than fade. We had abstain-on-disagreement logic in the equity-style model but we had not ported it to the draft-event model yet. We are porting it now; for Round 2 + 3 picks tomorrow you will see fewer takes on positions where market moved more than 30 cents from open in the prior 48 hours.

#4 — Pearson (Patriots, EDGE) — model: O 1.5 OL in top-5 at +120 — graded WIN

Even though the Pearson pick itself was DT-not-OL, our O 1.5 OL in top-5 was on a different counter — total OL, not first OL. Patriots took an OL at #4 (Brennan), giving us our second OL in the top-5 alongside Cleveland's Bailey. +120 ticket cashed. Closing line moved to -105 against us slightly post-Atlanta-DT-shock; CLV +2%.

This is a textbook case of the multi-leg structure paying for itself. The model had 53% on the conditional "OL2 by pick 6 given OL1 by pick 3." We hit at +120 because the market priced "OL2 by pick 5" with Atlanta-takes-OL implicit — once Atlanta went DT, the market mispriced the Patriots' need-state for one cycle.

#5 — Reese (Las Vegas, WR) — model: O 24.5 draft position at -110 — graded LOSS

Reese went at #5 to LV. Our model had him at 32.5 average draft position with 71% O 24.5. Lost cleanly. Closing line had moved from -110 to -190 between post and tip, meaning the market had already partially priced this drift but our 71% O 24.5 prior never updated. CLV -28% — our worst single-pick CLV of the night.

Lesson: the WR market in Round 1 ran 80 cents in the 24 hours before tip-off because of Sunday-night weight-room reports we weren't ingesting in time. The reports were on r/NFL by 8 PM Sunday; our market-feed-pipeline didn't pick up the implied movement until Tuesday morning, by which time we had already locked posts. For the next event-slate, we are wiring a 24-hour pre-event re-grading window so picks with closing-line drift greater than 50 cents in the final day pull-or-replace before tip.

Aggregate damage report by mistake category

Category	Picks	W	L	Net	Lesson rolling forward
Position-need miss (Bailey/Cooper/Reese)	7	2	5	-3.7u	abstain-on-disagreement port to draft model
GM-tape-pattern miss (Atlanta)	3	1	2	-1.4u	weight tape-pattern signal higher in OL-stack
Pre-event closing drift miss (Reese)	4	1	3	-2.6u	24h re-grading window
Multi-leg conditional hit (Patriots OL)	5	4	1	+3.1u	keep — high signal
Clean model-vs-market gap, > 12c (Mendoza)	8	7	1	+5.8u	keep — high signal

The takeaway: our wins were concentrated in the model-vs-market gap and conditional-leg buckets. Our losses were concentrated in three identifiable methodological gaps that we have specific, code-level fixes for. The aggregate number (+2.1% ex-vig) hides this structure; the post-mortem doesn't.

What this post-mortem changes for the next event slate

1. Abstain-on-disagreement ported from equity model to event model. If our model and the market disagree by more than 30 cents on a draft-position prop with less than 24 hours to event, no post.
2. Pre-event re-grading window of 24 hours. Picks with greater than 50 cents of closing drift in the final day get pulled or replaced before tip.
3. GM-tape-pattern signal weight in OL-stack model raised from 0.18 to 0.31. (We had this signal already; it was systematically underweighted.)
4. Honest sample-size note on every event-slate post going forward. 39 settled picks is not enough to claim statistical edge — only to claim directional signal.

We are publishing this post 96 hours after the event so the closing-line numbers and the ungraded markets have all settled cleanly. The post is dated to today's publish time, not to the event itself.

If you want to verify any of the picks above, every one has a /verify-pick permalink and the SHA-256 hash chain on /record. The math is open.

Full Round 1 record · Methodology · Verify a pick

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