Draft Pick Value Estimator

A draft pick value chart converts a selection slot into a single tradeable number so that packages of unequal picks can be compared. The shape matters more than the units: value falls off steeply, so the top of the board is worth far more per slot than the middle. This tool models that with V = 3000 * e^(-0.0145 * pick) plus a small linear residual of 0.3 points per remaining pick, which keeps late selections from collapsing to zero. At pick 1 the model returns roughly 3,020 points, near 1,940 by pick 32, and near 740 by pick 100. Total picks are set by rounds times 32 slots, so a 7-round draft is 224 selections before compensatory awards. The two side outputs are hit-rate proxies rather than projections of a named player. Pro Bowl probability decays exponentially from the mid-80s at the top of round one into single digits by round three, matching the historical pattern that elite talent clusters early. Expected career Approximate Value follows the same decay. The caveats matter: point charts describe how front offices have actually traded, not what a pick is worth in surplus terms, and they ignore position scarcity, contract cost, and roster need. Any exponential fit also smooths over the real, lumpy year-to-year variation in class strength. Treat a surplus inside roughly 5 to 10 percent as noise rather than as an edge.

Trade value charts entered NFL practice with the Dallas Cowboys in the early 1990s. The chart is generally credited to Mike McCoy, a Cowboys minority owner with a background in oil and gas, who compiled past trades into a table of point values for head coach Jimmy Johnson. It was descriptive rather than theoretical: the numbers were fitted to what picks had historically been exchanged for, not to what players later produced. Photocopies spread around the league through the 1990s, and by the end of the decade nearly every front office negotiated from some version of the same table, which made the chart self-reinforcing. Later analytics work challenged it. In The Loser's Curse, economists Cade Massey and Richard Thaler argued that early picks were systematically overpriced once rookie salary was accounted for, because teams overestimate their ability to distinguish among prospects. Approximate Value, the career metric used here, was created by Doug Drinen of Pro Football Reference in 2008 to place players at every position on one comparable scale. The 2011 collective bargaining agreement introduced a rookie wage scale that cut top-pick salaries sharply and changed the surplus math again. Alternative charts published since by Chase Stuart, Rich Hill, and the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective all flatten the curve, assigning more weight to rounds two through four than the original chart does.