How do NFL teams value future draft selections?

There’s a lot of noise out there regarding how teams value draft picks. The reality is that teams are pretty consistent in how they devalue future options.

How do NFL front offices value future draft picks? The old standby was that a future pick was devalued by one round, so that a future 4th-round pick (for example) carried the same value as a current 5th-round pick. However, it has come in vogue to question that, instead arguing that front offices really value future picks as a pick toward the end of the round in question. Underneath this idea, a future 3rd-round pick would be valued as pick #96 or #98. At least one popular site claims that future picks are valued as the 24th-pick of the designated round, in which case a future 2nd-round pick would actually be valued like pick #56!

Well, it turns out that since the new collective bargaining agreement went into effect, there have been more than 80 trades of future picks that did not involve a player on either side, meaning that all of the values are basically knowable. In the future, I might dive into these numbers more thoroughly, but for now I simply defaulted to the Jimmy Johnson chart, which is still every bit as accurate in most rounds as any other in terms of how well front offices value picks.

When tradition wins

First, let’s start with the obvious. Twenty times, the only thing traded on one side was a single pick and the only thing traded on the other side was a single future pick. In every last one of these cases, the pick was devalued by one round–when a 4th-rounder was traded for a single pick in the future, it was traded for a future 3rd-rounder (and so on). That’s not looking good for those who want to upset the apples-to-oranges cart of draft picks. We can also add two more trades that involved only two stacked picks on one side and a single future pick on the other side. Those two also conformed to the expectation that a future pick counted as a pick one round later than the technical value traded.

Second, we can look at the high-value picks (picks that under the current format would be Day 1/Day 2 picks). There have been twenty-eight future picks from the first three rounds traded where only a single future pick was involved, and in all but two cases, the “remainder” value of the future pick was reduced by a single round. Because four of these are duplicates from the first pool, that means that we are actually adding 22 more examples of times when a future pick was devalued by essentially one round with only two outliers.

The first outlier is when the New England Patriots under Bill Belichick accepted pick #105 and a future 2nd-round pick from Ryan Pace in order to give the Chicago Bears pick #51. In order for the points to line up, the Patriots would need to have considered a future second-rounder to be equal to the 28th pick of the same draft. That example is worth coming back to later.

The second outlier is when the New York Jets traded up for Sam Darnold. They gave up three second-round picks (including one future second-rounder) to move from #6 to #3. In order for those books to balance, the future pick would need to be valued at -340 points, or equal to an anti-2nd rounder. More plausibly, the Jets got desperate and created one of the true overpays in recent NFL history.

For those keeping score at home, that’s 44 wins for the idea that future picks are discounted by a single round and 2 losses (one to Bill Belichick being unconventional and another to the Jets managing to get in their own way).

When 2+2 actually equals 4

However, things finally look bad for the traditional mindset when the picks from Rounds 4+ are considered. Twenty-nine trades have been made that involve only a single future pick on one side when that single future pick is after the third round. And only 10 of those 29 (34%) conform. For the record, that still means that at worst the score stands 54-21 in favor of the single-round discount. However, those remaining 19 late picks need consideration.

In the case of two of them, they are future 7th-rounders, which means that they cannot be discounted any more. Another three are actually future selections that were discounted by two rounds, not one, and so they are true outliers that probably have individual explanations (although interestingly, all three involve a future 4th-rounder being valued like a 6th-rounder). What about the other 14? It comes down to general managers, really, because there are really 15 trades available to consider (we can’t forget the previously mentioned Patriots-to-Bears trade for Anthony Miller involving a future 2nd-rounder).

Four of those trades were made by Trent Baalke with two different organizations, three of them were made by Scot McCloughan with Washington, and two were made by Bill Belichick and Brandon Beane individually. Interestingly, Beane has openly criticized the idea of draft trade value (saying something to the effect of “who gives a Martz?” when asked about such things). Belichick was noted to prefer trading down if players from his narrow board were not aligned with his value, and McCloughan and Baalke were both part of the same front office in San Francisco and worked together for years.

That essentially means that not only is the dominant trend in the NFL to devalue future picks by a single round (a trend that is nearly universally applied at the top of the draft), the majority of the exceptions to this rule even later in the draft can be attributed to the individual preferences of a small handful of GMs. Otherwise, conventional wisdom stands and future picks are valued at a one-round discount.