Are We Getting Better or Are They Getting Worse? Draft Position, Strength of Schedule, and Competitive Balance in the National Football League

Monopsonistic labor market institutions, such as amateur drafts and free agency restrictions, are often justified by their competitive balance generating properties. In this paper we re-examine the balancing effect of the amateur draft for the National Football League. We extend an earlier treatment of this issue by Grier and Tollison (J Econ Behav Organ 33: 136–149, 1994) by incorporating the unbalanced scheduling policy of the league, relative team payrolls, and team injury rates into our empirical model. We find that the college draft has a quantitatively strong and statistically significant effect on team performance even when incorporating several significant controls