NFL DRAFTIGAMI

Draftigami is the art of making a positional draft pick that has never been made before in NFL history. Some combinations (a QB at #1) happen constantly. Some (a long snapper in round 1) have never happened. This chart shows all of them.

v1 uses coarse position groups so the chart is readable on one screen and the white spots are real white spots, not artifacts of how a 1971 newspaper labeled a guy "guard" vs "tackle." A granular toggle may come later.

1994 is the start of the 7-round era. Pre-1994 drafts had 8–17 rounds and ~336 picks each, which made the chart 75% empty space and obscured the modern story.

Originally this was a 262-wide horizontal-scrolling nightmare and the answer here was "the developer has absolutely no idea how to present a 9×262 grid in a mobile-friendly format, so he barely tried." Then we flipped the axes — positions across the top, picks down the side — and the chart became 9 cells wide × 262 cells tall, which fits any phone. Sometimes the bug fixes itself.

From Jon Bois's Chart Party series at SB Nation (now Secret Base). His 2017 video "Every NFL Score Ever" introduced the concept of scorigami — final scores no NFL game has ever produced. It's one of the great pieces of sports writing on the internet, and it's the direct inspiration for this. If you've never seen it, watch it now:

The live tracker site at nflscorigami.com grew out of that video and the @nflscorigami bot. Bois's adjacent work on Dorktown (the per-team historical deep dives, like the legendary Mariners series) is in the same spirit and worth your time too.

This one is by Andrew Martin, a tribute to the original. Data from nflverse via nfl_data_py, with current-year picks scraped from Wikipedia until nflverse catches up. Source on GitHub.