NFL Draft Trade Machine

Welcome to the Sports + Numbers NFL Draft Trade Machine, a handy resource to see what teams can do with the assets they have and to evaluate trades as they happen. While I am biased toward my own value chart, I included several others so that individual users can select the one they prefer or look at the differences.

Make edits to the blue-shaded cells to customize for any scenario you want to look at and see where it lands on the graph (with actual 2012 trades overlaid as black diamonds).




I've given in to my recent fixation on the NFL draft and decided to focus exclusively on it for the next few weeks. For those of you just stopping by for the first time, check out a few of my NFL-themed posts:

• Draft-themed
• A summary of the various draft value charts 
• Detailed introduction of my own draft value chart and analysis of whether it fits the results on the field
• Analysis of whether the NFL combine helps or hurts accuracy of draft picks
• The top ten drafts of the salary cap era (split into 10-6 and 5-1)
• Other NFL
• A look at injury rates for running QBs and non-running QBs
• Two articles about how frustrating forecasts are as a Browns fan (actually analyses of future power rankings and beginning-of-season forecasts)

Additional notes on the trade machine:

• Sources for each chart
• Existing Chart: Here's a version at ESPN
• Sports + Numbers 
• Football Perspective
• Harvard Sports Analysis Collective
• Discount Rate - Cade Massey and Richard Thaler's paper, The Loser's Curse, provides the 136% number
• Mean Reversion - I've found this to be roughly 58% in the last 20 years
• 2012 trade data
  

NFL Draft value charts for everyone!

ESPN.com’s Mike Sando, writer for the NFC West blog, put together an interesting series of posts last Thursday and Friday about the draft capital available to each team. The Thursday post looked at the capital available according to the NFL Draft value chart in wide use within the league, created by the Cowboys organization in the early 1990s, which we’ll call Chart Classic from here on out. On Friday, Sando analyzed each team’s position according to a revised version of the chart created by Kevin Meers in 2011 and featured on the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective site. As you can see below, the capital of each team varies widely between the two[1].

 

Total draft capital for 2013 draft (based on picks as of 3/26)

Being a fan of updating the draft value chart myself, I thought I would be helpful and provide a crack at this with my version of the chart and throw in Chase Stuart’s from FootballPerspective.com as well. Chase acknowledges the crucial point that his chart does not specifically account for the value of concentration of skill. One dollar is better than four quarters on the football field. While using Career Salary Cap Value rather than Career Approximate Value should help mine reflect the excess value of star players, it is a point of uncertainty in my chart as well.

One of the major things that sticks out from looking at the comparison of each chart against the original is how much additional capital is floating around. Picks 2-254 in the draft are worth 19.2x the number 1 pick according to Chart Classic. The comparable numbers for my chart, Football Perspective and HSAC are 37.0x, 44.1x and 54.1x. In more tangible terms Chart Classic is saying that only one team, Jacksonville, has the capital to put together a worthy trade offer for Kansas City using only this year’s picks. My chart would say that 22 teams have enough – though this would cost Green Bay all of their picks just to equal the value so that’s not much inducement for KC to do the deal. Football Perspective has it at 28 and the HSAC chart shows each team having sufficient capital to acquire the pick.

The relative improvement of teams is remarkably similar between the three alternative methods. 

This makes sense, as all are based on roughly the same logarithmic function.

A final chart to highlight the differences between the four charts shows all four valued as a percentage of the number one overall pick.

All four charts with each pick shown as a percentage of the value of the top pick

In this one the differences come out a bit more strongly. The switch from logarithmic to linear halfway through the draft is clear in my chart, while the chart from the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective is an outlier by not reaching near-zero value for the last pick.

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[1] My totals vary ever so slightly from those featured in Sando’s ESPN.com post because I had to recreate the updated version of the Meers chart that he used. Through trial and error I found it to be the log trendline from the posted 1^st round values on Meers’ original post, ignoring the posted values for subsequent picks. Once I had this I could also extend out to the 254^th pick to account for the compensatory picks. Apologies to Kevin if I misrepresent his data through errors in my recreation.