What is Career Score?
Career Score is our open-data measure of what an NFL career was actually worth, and the ruler every accuracy claim on this site is graded against.
Every draft board is a prediction, and a prediction is only as good as the thing you grade it against. Career Score is that thing here. It answers one question about a player's career: how much did he actually give an NFL team?
It is built from three things, all of them public. How much he played — snap share, weighted so his best season counts most, because a career is defined by its peak more than its average. How long he lasted, which separates a five-year starter from a good rookie year. And what the market paid him on a second contract, which is the NFL's own verdict on whether it wanted him back.
It replaced Pro Football Reference's weighted Approximate Value in August 2026. Approximate Value is a fine metric and not ours — we couldn't publish its inputs, audit its edge cases, or explain why a guard scored what he scored. Career Score is built from data anyone can pull, which means anyone can check our grading rather than take it on faith.
Scores are percentiles within position. A guard is measured against guards, never against receivers, because the raw production of the two jobs isn't comparable and pretending otherwise would quietly rank every skill player above every lineman.
The honest limit: Career Score only exists for players who reached the NFL. It can tell you how well a board ordered the players who got drafted. It cannot tell you anything about who should have been drafted and wasn't.