Best undrafted NFL players in the seven round draft era

The NFL draft was changed from 12 rounds to eight in 1993 and then to seven in 1994, where it has remained.

So players like Gary Kubiak, who was drafted in the eighth round, would have been an undrafted free agent had he played in the modern NFL. Similarly Karl Mecklenburg, who was taken in the 12th round, would have also been an undrafted college player had he played in the modern NFL.

So with that in mind, I restricted this to players who played at least some of their NFL career after 1993. I used Pro Football Reference.com’s approximate value (AV) to compare players across positions, and I excluded kickers (the original list was the top 100 - there were five undrafted kickers who made it).

I then calculated AV per year in the league that the players generated and sorted from highest to lowest. I also kept an eye on All-Pro selections, Pro Bowl selections and career longevity. The rankings are as below. Note that Phillip Lindsay is not on the list, mainly because he has only played two NFL seasons. AV/year is in the column on the far left. Asterisk denotes player currently in the Hall of Fame.

The four Denver Broncos who made the top 30 are Rod Smith, Chris Harris, Matt Lepsis and Greg Kragen. Other former Broncos who show up on the list are Casey Weigman, Wesley Woodyard, Paris Lenon, Tony Jones and Mike Adams. With the exception of Woodyard, those guys are not generally associated with the Broncos - although you could make the argument for Tony Jones since he was the starting LT for our first two Super Bowl wins.

One of the problems with using AV/year as the metric is that it penalizes a guy like James Harrison (2x AP, 5x PB) simply for having a long career where he was not a very good player at the end. I don’t think that Matt Lepsis (who never made the Pro Bowl) is a better player than James Harrison, who was the defensive player of the year in 2008. However, that is what the numbers say (numbers can lie, or at least be tortured into lying). Harrison’s yearly average is really hurt by the final six years of his NFL career (2012-2017) where he was a shadow of the player he once was. He had 26.5 sacks and 61 QB hits in his final six seasons. He had 16.0 sacks and 19 QB hits in 2008.

Matt Lepsis, OTOH, started 133 of a possible 144 games for the Broncos from 1999-2007 (he missed 10 games with injury in 2006). He started all 16 games in his final NFL season 2007 before he retired. This gave him a higher AV/yr value than James Harrison. In other words, Lepsis was average or above average as starting tackle for almost every year he played while Harrison was elite for a few years, but below average for enough years at the end of his career that it dragged his yearly average down.

Re-doing this study using All-Pro and Pro Bowl selections (in that order), Harrison moves up to ninth from 29th and Lepsis and Kragen both drop way down the list as neither made the Pro-Bowl (although Kragen was 1st team All-Pro one year). Here is the list resorted using First Team All-Pro and First Team Pro Bowl selections as the sorting criteria (showing only top 30). Note that Chris Harris moves up to 14th with this sorting.

For what it’s worth, Phillip Lindsay has one First Team Pro-Bowl selection, and he has an average 7.5 AV/yr so far for his career. If he can continue to produce at roughly the same level in the next four or five years as he has in his first two seasons, he will make this list.

That is a tall ask for an NFL RB, though. They generally have very short careers, but I’m hopeful that Lindsay will be mentioned with some of the other notable running backs on this list when he is done: Priest Holmes, Arian Foster, Fred Jackson and Pierre Thomas.