Trade value table

[Ex-hippie]

Can someone please clue me in on why NFL teams place so much value on the universal trade value table? Where do these numbers come from? I know Jimmy Johnson did as much as anyone to popularize them, but did he or anyone else just make the numbers up? Is there any kind of research on the historic values of different picks?

Every time I look at it, it strikes me as being incredibly top-heavy. Say my team, the Seahawks, wanted to trade up from #25 into the top 15. (I started thinking about this because I was considering what it would cost us to move ahead of Arizona, which, like Seattle, is probably looking at a RB like Stewart or Mendenhall, and also happens to be a division rival.) According to the table, if we traded the #25 and our second-rounder (#56), it is just barely enough to move up to #15, and not quite enough to move up to #14. Can that really be true? A second-round pick is the cost just to move up from the late first round to the middle of the first round? Offhand, I would expect an NFL value chart to be much less front-loaded than this in most years -- football requires a lot of players and a well-balanced roster, teams' needs are often wildly different, and players are hard to project.

Alternatively, the chart says Seattle can move down from its position at #25, in the "mid-late-first-round," to #32, or "late-late-first-round," and pick up a third-rounder in the process. Is that really the going rate?? That sounds too good to be true. I'd love to be able to do that.

Believe me, I'm the first to acknowledge that "it just doesn't sound right" is not a valid criticism. But I'd like to know what empirical basis there is for assigning these values in the first place.

And yes, I know these are general guidelines and not hard-and-fast numbers. 2008 might be different from 2007 or 2009, especially when your team is looking at a RB and may well be happy with Felix Jones instead of Stewart or Mendenhall. But to hear some people talk about the chart, you'd think it was etched in stone forever.

If there's something that proves the #1 overall pick has historically tended to be worth TWO #7 overall picks, can someone point it out to me?

[ReasonablySober]

You can find the answers you're looking for very easily by googling "NFL Draft Day Trades". Check out past trades, see how closely they follow the value chart. Many times they follow it exactly, other times not so much.

The last few seasons:

2007 NFL Draft.

2006 NFL Draft.

2005 NFL Draft.

[Ex-hippie]

Thanks, but I'm not asking whether teams follow these guidelines. It's well known that they do, and that trades in the last few years have more or less adhered to them. The question is, who established these numbers in the first place, and why?

[Ex-hippie]

Bump... and I feel somewhat vindicated by the ESPN magazine draft guide, which arrived this week and which I read today. (Yeah yeah, I know, ESPN mag sucks, but I get it free with my Insider subscription, so.) Key quote:

Potential trading partners that aren't scared off by the cap's voodoo economics are handcuffed by the value chart that has become standard across the NFL.... Problem is, the chart is absurdly top-heavy, making it hard for teams to trade down and to look like they didn't get taken in the eyes of the fans and the media. "Every GM would trade these picks in a heartbeat if they could," says Polian. "But no one else wants to pay for them."

This ain't right, people! If "handcuffed" is the word for the effect of a chart that's "absurdly top-heavy," and supply isn't meeting demand, this is what we call a market failure. If it's "absurd," why follow it? Again, my original question: how did these numbers get assigned in the first place, and why do teams feel so constrained by them?

[Ex-hippie]

I guess I didn't understand your question the first time around. But again, Google provides the answers you seek:

What is the Trade Value Chart? It is a noble idea, a chart that assigns numeric values to every draft pick to create some kind of standard for assessing fair value in trades. Yet what makes it definitive and the hallmark of the NFL? This I don

[Ex-hippie]

I believe the economics are the reason the picks aren't often traded. You could make an argument that as many as six players should go #1 this year. Why would a team move up to take a guy that may not even be better than someone sitting their at #5?

I would agree with that, but then the conclusion would seem to be that the #5 pick is very nearly as valuable as the #1. So it should cost very little to move up, or maybe you don't even want to trade anything to move up when you consider the differences in salary. Yet the table says that to move up from #5 to #1, you would have to throw in equivalent value to the #10 overall pick. If such a trade went down, I think it's the fans of the team moving up that would be angry. I can see it in making sense in basketball, where a draft can feature a single superstar, a single superstar can change a franchise's fortune, and (since there are only five players on the court at a time) quantity isn't all that important. But none of those rationales apply to football.

But thanks for the link to the editorial. I haven't read it but I will.

[Ex-hippie]

One other thing... after posting, I read further and some ESPN writers proposed an alternative trade value chart that moves radically in the other direction. In this version, moving up from #5 to #1 costs you nothing more than a 7th-round pick. In fact, moving up from the end of the first round (#32) to #1 costs you only a high fourth-rounder. That also sounds wrong. The truth must be somewhere in between.

[studcrackers]

are you sure that column wasnt a joke? could u imagine if the 5th and 1st pick were exchanged for the price of a 7th rounder, (Please Use More Appropriate Word)

[Icness]

I think they need to factor in the relative talent pool of the current draft, not sticking so strictly to what happened in past drafts. Like this year--no clear-cut #1. The value of the top pick shouldn't be as high as in a year where there was a legit #1 overall pick, like Carson Palmer or Peyton Manning. Or an elite tier of 2-3 players...you get the picture.

The financials definitely play a major role in the lack of top 10 trades. Look at Jamarcus Russell--he's making more this coming season (as a cap hit) than Tom Brady, Drew Brees, and Matt Hasselbeck combined. Not many teams want to take that kind of cap hit or stroke a check for $11M or guarantee $30M+ for a player that probably won't get you to the playoffs within 2 years.

[Ex-hippie]

are you sure that column wasnt a joke? could u imagine if the 5th and 1st pick were exchanged for the price of a 7th rounder, (Please Use More Appropriate Word)

If it was, I'm seriously humor-challenged. And I'm usually good at picking that kind of thing up. I didn't detect any irony in the article. I already threw the magazine out (did I mention ESPN mag sucks?) and can't go back to look. But it contained a pretty elaborate re-proposed trade chart. In the real thing, the #1 pick is worth 3000 points and the #5 is worth 1700. This version had the #5 being worth something more like 2700.

One point the article did make, which I won't write off as a joke at all, is that in some cases it might be better to pick later instead of earlier. That's because of the salary slots. A rational team picking #1 might just intentionally let the clock expire, Mike Tice-syle. The article then goes on to say that it would be a PR nightmare and impossible to explain to fans, which is true.

I think Icness's point is good common sense. Each draft has its own unique distribution of talent. (Back to the ESPN article: it mentioned that the sample that had been used to create the table was based on a couple of particularly top-heavy drafts. So there you go.) The table is therefore virtually meaningless from year to year, and yet GMs find themselves constrained by it. This is not rational. This is a market failure. Michael Lewis wrote a whole book about a baseball GM exploiting market failures, outsmarting the rest of the GMs and building a strong team. You wonder if some smart GM is going to do the same thing with the NFL draft. In baseball, he did it by stockpiling players who could get on base; in football, it looks like you can do it by trading down and accumulating more bodies to compete for jobs. I think it can happen.