Creating A New Currency For Draft Pick Valuation
Allowing For Evaluation Across Different Types Of Assets
Earlier this season the Jacksonville Jaguars dealt starting left tackle Cam Robinson to the Minnesota Vikings and received a 2026 5th round draft pick in return. That’s a day three pick two drafts from now for a starting-caliber player at one of the more important positions in football.
Wide receivers Davante Adams and Amari Cooper were both traded for day-two picks. Adams is still one of the best receivers in football and Cooper notched over 1,300 yards last year.
Every year established NFL players, some of whom are bona fide stars, get traded for what many fans and even analysts feel are the equivalent of draft pick peanuts compared to their on-field production. Why are draft picks so overvalued? Or better yet, are they? How can teams determine the value of established players against that of draft picks?
Currently, there is a pretty linear valuation of NFL players. Teams value the players on field production in terms of how much that player would command on the open market if they were to become a free agent immediately. Adjustments are then made based off of the cash owed to the player going forward compared to the value of that production.
Let’s use Cam Robinson as an example. When the Vikings traded for him earlier this year they were getting a rental. Robinson was in the last year of his contract. Based on our contract projections Robinson’s on field production has his value at around $15.25 APY. And the Vikings were going to have access to Robinson for just nine of the 17 games in a season for a total value of $8.08 million. In trading for him they were also agreeing to pay the remainder of his salary for the year, estimated at $9.145 million. The difference between those numbers actually decreased Robinson’s value to the Vikings by $1.07 million bringing his overall value to them to $7.01 million.
The question that begs then is, “What does $7 million worth of draft picks look like?”
Current Draft Valuation Charts Ignore The Real Currency Of Football
There has been some excellent work done over the years in understanding the true value of draft picks. The first official chart, and the one that is still most common, is the Jimmy Johnson/Dallas Cowboys chart of the late 90’s. Without going into too much detail Johnson sought to establish a common valuation of draft picks for every NFL franchise to use in the hopes of streamlining pick for pick trades.
His gambit worked as the NFL has adopted this chart for the better part of 35 years now. There were flaws in the chart that have long been studied. And in more recent years others have attempted to find a more accurate valuation. This has led up to the Spielberger/Fitzgerald chart of the last five years.
Brad Spielberger, then at Pro Football Focus, and Jason Fitzgerald at Over The Cap, developed a more empirical chart looking at the actual value of players drafted from 2011 to 2015 by looking at those players second contracts. Spielberger and Fitzgerald compared the value of those contracts to the top 5 players at each position and smoothed the data by looking at the players picked a few spots before and a few spots after. They then further smoothed the data by putting it through a logarithmic regression.
The insights that Spielberger and Fitzgerald were able to glean is that the value of mid-round picks was actually much higher than Johnson’s original chart estimated. They were able to prove this by matching the value of the first overall pick using their methodology to that of Johnson’s. Both charts valued that pick at 3,000 points.
The points are an arbitrary currency. But they are useful in that it allows for comparison of values from one pick to the next. No matter which chart is used two teams looking to deal with each other can easily reference the chart and line up assets on each side of the deal to try and balance the value as close to zero as possible. Arbitrage can occur when the two teams use different charts to assess true value, but in most cases, they will at least deal off of the same chart.
The true problem enters when one or more teams wants to deal an asset that isn’t a draft pick. For instance, how many draft points is Cam Robinson worth?
Attempting To Find A Single Trade Currency
Understanding this fundamental difference between how players and draft picks are valued, we have undertaken the challenge of trying to bridge the gap. Here is an accounting of that process.
Step One: Find A Best-Use Process From Current Methods
Having read Spielberger and Fitzgerald’s book The Drafting Stage: Creating A Marketplace for NFL Draft Picks, we were very fond of the process they used to determine the value of each draft pick. The research behind their method, combined with the relative transparency of their process made it a great starting point for what we hoped to achieve.
Given that The Drafting Stage only looked at a sample size of five drafts, it gave us the opportunity to expand the sample size while trying to repeat the process. We looked at the 2011-2019 draft classes, which encompassed all draft classes since the landmark 2011 NFL-NFLPA collective bargaining agreement that put caps and slots on rookie contracts up until the last draft class where all draft picks have had an opportunity to find a second contract with little-to-no artificial dampening of their possible earnings.
For transparency, in our smoothing we looked at the three players taken prior to and three players taken after each draft pick where possible. For the first overall pick, we took the first three players selected. For the second we took the first four players and continuing that stretching process through pick four. We similarly contracted at the end of each draft.
Step Two: Converting To Dollars
Given that established players are evaluated in terms of contractual dollars, and that our model was already looking at contractual value of players drafted in their second contracts, it made sense to try and convert draft points into dollars rather than the other way around.
But there are challenges to this method. As Spielberger and Fitzgerald outlined in The Drafting Stage each position is valued differently by the league. When considering that in a vacuum any a player who plays any position could be drafted it creates barriers to establishing a monetary valuation equivalent to free agency dollars. Especially because in this scenario there is no predetermined value for the first overall pick for which to set the rest of the model.
Our way of bridging that divide was to look at the probability of a player at each position being selected within in certain pick “buckets”. We established those buckets as:
Top-5
6-10
11-16
17-32
33-50
51-75
76-100
101-133
134-168
169-203
204-256
From there we could take our average APY of the second contract value as a % of the top five players at a player’s position and multiply it by the likelihood of each position being selected within that bucket. Then multiplying that value by the average APY of the top-5 players at each position.
For Example: Here is the probability of each position being taken within the first five picks of the draft over the 2011-2019 time period:
QB - 26.67%
RB - 8.89%
WR - 11.11%
TE - 0.00%
OT - 11.11%
OG - 2.22%
OC - 0.00%
IDL - 4.44%
EDGE - 26.67%
ILB - 2.22%
CB - 6.67%
S - 0.00%
K - 0.00%
P - 0.00%
LS - 0.00%
After looking at the second contract for players taken 1st - 3rd in the draft over that time period averaged 65.33% of the APY of the top-5 players at their respective positions we were able to multiply that 65.33% by the probability of each position being taken and the average APY of the top-5 players at each position to create a composite value of the first overall pick of $21.24 million in 2024 cap dollars. Extrapolating that APY over four years (the length of a standard rookie contract for a player selected in the draft), gives us a total value of $84.98 million.
We repeated that process for every pick in the draft. To improve the data, we also looked to smooth it similarly to how Spielberger and Fitzgerald did by applying logarithmic regression to the data. Here are the results:
The shape of this matches the Spielberger/Fitzgerald logarithmic regression fairly closely.
Here is a look at our findings as compared to Spielberger and Fitzgerald’s original chart using the same currency of points with the first overall pick valued at 3,000.
As you can see, the two charts take similar shapes with our model showing a decreased value the more the draft moves on that at its largest gap represents a difference of 4.14% of the value of the first overall pick.
The difference can be accounted for through slight differences in methodology or through increased sample size. While Spielberger and Fitzgerald accounted for first round draft picks who had their fifth-year options exercised, we adjusted our model to look at the contracts those players signed after their fifth year to get a truer understanding of their free marketplace value. We also had four additional years of data accounted for.
The Final Chart
We say “Final Chart” but really it isn’t. This chart will adjust year-over-year due to two factors. One the rising nature of the salary cap. Part of the goal of this chart is to keep the values of the picks relevant to the current NFL landscape. That landscape changes as the salary cap does. It also will account for the ever-changing calculus of positional value. As certain positions become more or less important through team draft and contractual strategies this model should be able to adjust to account for those changes, although it will be about a year behind admittedly. But for right now in 2024 salary cap dollars here is the value of each draft pick.
A Better Understanding Of Player For Pick Trades
Let’s revisit that Cam Robinson trade. We previously established Robinson’s value, when his cash owed was factored in, at $7.01 million. Robinson was traded with a 2026 7th round draft pick for a 2026 5th round draft pick. With neither team knowing where they will pick in 2026 it is reasonable to peg value for each pick at the 16th overall pick of that round and teams have long discounted picks a round for each year in the future the pick is pushed out to.
Based on this methodology, the 2026 5th round pick going to Jacksonville can be seen as around the 190th pick in the 2025 NFL Draft, which is worth $8.21 million. Conversely, a 2026 7th round pick would have no value as there are no rounds past the 7th to discount for the pick coming from 2026 and not 2025. However, if we were to place a nominal value for any 7th rounder two years out at half the value of the final pick in the current draft, pick 262 which is worth $1.97 million, and a 7th rounder two years out at a quarter of that value we could establish values of $0.99 million and $0.50 million for each, respectively.
Using that nominal valuation the Jaguars sent Robinson, valued at $7.01 million, and a 2026 7th round pick, valued at $0.99 million, for a total package value of $8 million to the Vikings for a 2026 5th rounder, valued at $8.21 million. The difference in packages is to Jacksonville’s favor at a total of $210k, which is less than the established value of a 7th rounder two drafts out.
This could be seen as an extremely even trade. And it can be seen that way because we now have a method to evaluate all of the assets in a single form of currency.