We must admit a guilty pleasure to you: We follow the NFL draft, when NFL football teams poke, prod, test, and time former college football players who seek to play in the league and earn the millions of dollars a year professional players are often paid.

It is a hopeful time for fans who wonder if a particular quarterback or wide receiver is who their team needs to win the Super Bowl (or, in my Jacksonville Jaguars case, get to .500!). But our interest goes beyond the impact the players might have on the field. The draft also has interesting lessons for investors.

The NFL strives through its rules and policies to make every game close and interesting. This, in part, has created passionate and vocal fans. This passion leads to billions of dollars in revenue for the league. Success on the field increases the teams’ revenues and profits. NFL franchises sell for hundreds of millions of dollars, so they are generally owned by successful businesspeople. The scouts are professionals who are dedicated to the assessment of football players. Since the first NFL draft was held in 1936, thousands of players have been drafted and played, the media and fans have scrutinized every pick, and, thus there is a large data set.

So drafting is very public, costly in terms of salaries paid to the drafted players, and influential to the value of the franchises. The drafters have expertise, lots of data, and a singular motivation – to win. And yet the most common metric discussed prior to the draft is the 40-yard dash time. A player’s performance in the 40-yard dash greatly impacts how highly he is drafted and, therefore, his pay. Unfortunately, there is no correlation between a player’s 40-yard dash time and his success on the field other than at the running back position. One must wonder: if highly knowledgeable and singularly motivated experts with lots of data can persist on valuing a meaningless metric, then what opportunities exist in the stock market where there are divergent motivations, imperfect data, and unexamined candidates?

Divergent motivations among market participants can be seen in spinoffs, bankruptcies, and businesses whose stock has performed poorly. Some investors simply sell spinoffs without regard to the valuation because they are not interested in the business, the market capitalization is below the minimum of their investment mandate, or the resulting position is not worth their time. To avoid taint and discomfort, some investors sell their losers or will not purchase the securities of businesses in or near bankruptcy.

The unexamined include small market capitalization businesses, newly public companies for which is there is not a readily available comparison, businesses that fall in the no man’s land between Growth and Value investors, conglomerates, and complex situations. Determining the intrinsic value of these – even finding them – requires a lot of hard work that many are not willing to undertake. The process is fun for us, not work.

Finally, we capitalize on situations where other investors overemphasize metrics or characteristics relative to the impact on intrinsic value. Some metrics/characteristics that are overvalued include trading liquidity of the security, high current growth (often without consideration of the durability of that growth), the glamour of the company and/or industry in which is competes, EBITDA, and simplicity. We happily (and profitably!) supply their qualities to the market by buying when these attributes are receding and selling when they are increasing.