NFl Draft Economics - Part 1 - Introduction

Here I will begin a series of posts discussing the economics of the NFL Draft.  The NFL Draft puzzles me.  Every year.  There are many economists (those who are both smarter and more qualified than I am) who've tried to explain it, and I'll cover their analyses in the posts to come. 

Naturally, this is a rather difficult topic to address in one simple post, so I'll do it over a few.  It's a very broad topic - it covers the evolution of the game, identifying and measuring talent, economics, labor issues, psychology, and human behavior, among others.  I won't go into all these topics, but will address some of them either directly or indirectly.  

Through all of this, the fundamental question I'll be trying to answer is why did the Detroit Lions take Matthew Stafford as the 1st pick in 2009 Draft, and pay him $78 million (actually, he has the potential to earn as much as $78 million over six years, and about $42 million is "guaranteed" - the reason the "guarantee" is in quotes is that while that is the quoted number in the press, his actual true guaranteed money is about $17 million).

And why did they do this after they took Joey Harrington with the 3rd pick overall in 2002?  And why did they do that after they took Andre Ware with the 7th overall pick in 1990?  And why did they do that after they took Chuck Long with the 12th overall pick in 1986?  That is the set of questions I'll attempt to answer.  There must be a reason why.  All the evidence suggests that they shouldn't have done this.  So why did they do this?