The Dossier is a collection of current draft eligible college players, all identified from the analysis of previous drafts. In short, it is a list of the players most likely to be drafted.
Women’s college soccer is a large landscape. With thirty two conferences containing over three hundred total teams and thousands of players, identifying who will be drafted seems a bit daunting. But it becomes much more manageable when looking through the lens of previous NWSL drafts.
Over the entirety of the draft, ninety percent of players have come from just seven conferences. Sixty percent of players come from just three (ACC, BIG10, PAC12). That’s a significant reduction in the time and effort it will take to identify prospects. It doesn’t mean that players can’t be drafted coming out of the Big Sky conference, just that it’s less likely.
Researching further, sixty-five percent of players drafted were conference All-Americans. The remaining thirty-five percent were an interesting combination of Mac Hermann watch list notables, players with youth national caps or camp invites, and then a few small school prospects who didn’t fit into any of those buckets (we talk about those in another article here).
Combining players from Conference All-American lists, the Mac Hermann watch list and identifying youth national team players or players with current caps for international countries produces over ninety-five percent of players. So that’s where we start. That’s what the Dossier is.
Releasing it before the college season uses the previous years Mac Hermann and All American lists. The goal for this list is to record the amount of carryover that can be predicted from season to season.
After the season, when the new Dossier is released, the goal is one-hundred percent. Not saying it will happen, but we all need to have goals. The Dossier will also be kept to a manageable size, currently hovering around 100 players. This number may shift and change as the process adapts, but the goal isn’t just to release a list of seniors and national team players and say “Hey we got 100% here. Look how smart and cool we are.” We want it to be manageable so player profiles can be created, articles can be released and highlights can be cut together and published to our YouTube channel.
With all that in mind, check out the newest post-season Dossier here.
SoccerDossier Staff
Working to cover and predict the NWSL draft earlier than it ever has been before. Make sure to check out our other articles, and The Dossier, a list of NWSL draft prospects!