How the 2023 Draft order is determined

The NFL Draft order is determined by a combination of regular season records, postseason performance, and the strength of schedule in the 2022 season.

The Super Bowl winner will be ranked 32; their opponents, will be 31.

Next, the remaining teams are assigned to 4 groups based on their playoff performance: losers of the Conference Championships (29, 30), Divisional Playoffs (25-28), and Wild Card games (19-24); and non-playoff teams (1-18).

Within those groups, teams are ordered based on win-loss record in the regular season, with the better record getting the later pick. Teams in different groups with the same W-L record are not tied. For example, the team with the highest record of Wild Card losers will be 24, even if it has a better record than a Divisional Playoff loser.

If there is a tie within a group (examples: 2 Wild Card losers with a 10-7 record, or 4 non-playoff teams with a 8-9 record), there are additional tiebreaker steps, which starts by the easier (lower) strength of schedule picking first.

Teams that are involved in a tiebreaker will cycle through the order each round, based on the tiebreaker order. Thus, in a 4-team tiebreaker, a team will rotate 1-4-3-2, the second team 2-1-4-3, the third 3-2-1-4, and the fourth 4-3-2-1.

2023 basic draft order

For the 2022 NFL Draft, the basic order of selections shown below (not including trades, compensatory and supplemental selections). PS is how far a team advanced in the postseason. Sched is the win percentage of a team’s opponents (strength of schedule). No tie existed this year beyond the strength-of-schedule tiebreaker. Subsequent rounds shows the order cycle in Rounds 2-7, where the first round follows the basic order. (When these columns are blank, that team has the same position every round.) Color banded rows group the teams that are involved in the same tiebreaker cycle.

Circumstances that were affected by the fact that the Bills-Bengals game being declared no contest are noted.

The Dolphins have forfeited their first-round selection due to tampering violations in the 2019 and 2021 seasons. The Texans forfeited their fifth-round selection due to a salary cap violation. The remainder of those rounds are shown with those picks shifting up one.

Image via Kansas City Sports Commission

Footnotes

• 1
  The cancelled game between the Bills and Bengals affected these selections. If the Bengals won a resumed game, it would have caused a tie in the strength of schedule between the Saints and Titans. In that case, this would have been the first use of an interconference tiebreaker that replaced a coin flip. That tiebreaker would have proceeded as follows:
  
  

  1. Head-to-head: not applicable
  2. Common games: 3, must have a minimum of 4
  3. Strength of victory: TEN .336, NO .462 (TEN would be #10 on weaker SoV)
• 2
  The Bills draft position is not affected by their cancelled game against the Bengals
• 3
  If the Bengals won their game against the Bills, the 49ers would have selected ahead of the Bengals on account of a lower strength of schedule. Because of the tie, the Bengals would have picked ahead of the 49ers in even-numbered rounds