Three of the NFL's most recent Super Bowl champions have something in common. The Chiefs used two first-round picks in 2022 on Trent McDuffie and George Karlaftis, then won back-to-back championships. The Eagles took Jalen Carter and Nolan Smith in 2023 and won the Super Bowl two seasons later.
And the Seahawks also drafted Devon Witherspoon and Jaxon Smith-Njigba in 2023, with both developing into stars before Seattle won it all in February. But there's another side to this story, and the New York Jets know it all too well. They had three first-round selections in 2022, landed some pretty good players, and somehow never made the playoffs.
Four seasons later, only one of those players remains on the roster. The Cleveland Browns have been down this road, too. They made five first-round picks across the 2017 and 2018 drafts, eventually won a playoff game, but couldn't sustain that success.
And with the Jets holding three first-round picks in 2027 and the Browns holding two, both franchises are about to get another chance. So what separates the teams that turn extra first-round picks into championships from those that find themselves starting over? Having Patrick Mahomes certainly helps, but not every Super Bowl winner needs a first-ballot Hall of Famer under center.
Put differently: How much comes down to making the right picks, and how much depends on everything else? To answer that, we went back through every NFL Draft since 2000 and found 103 instances in which a team had multiple first-round picks. In all, those teams selected 216 players, including 25 quarterbacks.
And as we've seen play out in real time, there's a big difference between finding good players and building a winning football team. It's easy to forget how promising the Jets' 2022 draft looked. They took Sauce Gardner fourth overall, Garrett Wilson at No. 10 and then traded back into Round 1 for Jermaine Johnson at No. 26.
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