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
  

3 Picks to Advance 1 Slot??!!

For just a taste of my ongoing project, here is my (still in process) grade of the Vikings-Browns trade last night that sent the #4, #118, #160 and #211 picks to Minnesota in exchange for the #3 pick.

The "Value" field pulls in the log regression of the average % of salary cap value provided by those picks in excess of the first undrafted free agent. That is to say the last pick of the 7th round may provide 0.7% of the cap value in an average season of their career, but they only provide 0.003% excess value over an undrafted free agent. Only the 0.003%, in that case, matters for the trade because that is the extra value provided over what the other team can achieve for free with the next best option (e.g., a UFA).

That will have to be it for the explanation as I need to get back to writing about 6,000 more words for my project on this very topic.

One more graph on the NFL Draft Value Chart

After re-reading my post from last night, I realized that I left out one more graph that may be of interest to readers. The normalized chart showing the change in the salary cap and guaranteed money to number one overall picks from 1994 to 2009 came up but then was never revisited to see the impact of the new CBA. With the final data point with Cam Newton’s $22 million and the new salary cap number of $120 million the graph below shows the full set (2010 salary cap excluded because it did not exist):

Guaranteed money (red) and salary cap (blue) 1994=100

In terms of relative difference between the change in the cap and guaranteed money from 1994, this puts 2011 on a level with 2003, 2000 and 1995. The big unknown now is whether the straitjacket the owners placed themselves into will hold or if salaries will somehow creep up faster than the cap as they did from 2003 to 2009.

Thoughts on the NFL Draft Value Chart

Edit - Take a look at my expanded thoughts on the NFL Draft Value Chart - and a proposal for revising the Chart - in this post from November 2012.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that you had just traded the best player on your team (one of the best in the league) for a whole mess of draft picks. If you had just done this, wouldn’t you want to convince people of the wisdom of your choice? Wouldn’t the best way to do that be to convince everyone that draft picks, particularly of the type you received, were highly valuable assets? I am not suggesting in that the Herschel Walker trade was anything short of brilliant for the Cowboys (this was not a hypothetical), but in order to convince people of the wisdom of the trade it certainly helped to establish a baseline valuation for draft picks that made the Cowboys’ haul look even better before those picks even had a chance to play out.

Since that time the Draft Value Chart developed by Jimmy Johnson’s organization in Dallas has become the gospel for a great number of NFL teams. At various times much of the NFL has used the chart and reports suggest that a number of teams still do. At a minimum it is still the go-to for reporters speculating on potential trades. Once the chart became widely accepted, draft picks became easily exchangeable as teams agreed on the value and constructed trades accordingly.