A new way to evaluate the cost of draft picks -- and to analyze trades

How to properly apportion value to every pick in the draft, and what it means for Draft weekend deals

Last season, the Jacksonville Jaguars dealt starting left tackle Cam Robinson to the Minnesota Vikings for a 2026 fifth-round pick. That’s a day three pick, two drafts in the future, for a starting-caliber player at one of the more important positions in football. More recently, the Niners traded Deebo Samuel for a 2025 fifth-round pick.

Established NFL players, some of whom are bona fide stars, continue to be traded for the equivalent of peanuts. 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, the league’s valuation of players is linear: Teams value the players on field production in terms of how much that player would command on the open market if they immediately became a free agent. Adjustments are then made based on the cash owed to the player going forward compared to the value of that production.

Let’s use Cam Robinson as an example. The tackle was in the last year of his contract, so the Vikings knew they were getting a rental. Based on contract projections, Robinson’s on-field production placed his value at around $15.25 million APY. Robinson went on to sign a $12 million APY deal with the Texans in free agency.

Given they would only have access to Robinson for nine games out of a 17-game season, the total estimation of his value at the time was $8.08 million. When trading for him, the Vikings were essentially 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, then: What does $7 million worth of draft picks look like?

Current Draft Valuation Charts Ignore The Real Currency Of Football

Determining the value of draft picks has been a long-running, never-ending process for front offices. Teams are constantly looking to appropriately value picks. The first official chart (and still the most common) was Jimmy Johnson’s Cowboys chart of the late 90s. Johnson wasn’t just trying to gain an advantage for Dallas, but was seeking to establish a common valuation for every franchise, to help streamline pick-for-pick trades. His gambit worked. The NFL has adopted Johnson’s chart for the better part of 35 years. There were flaws in the chart, though. And in more recent years, others have attempted to find a more accurate, universal way to value picks.

Brad Spielberger, then at Pro Football Focus, and Jason Fitzgerald at Over The Cap, developed a chart that assessed the actual value of players drafted between 2011 and 2015, using the second contract those draftees signed. Spielberger and Fitzgerald compared the value of those contracts to the top five 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.

One key takeaway from Spielberger and Fitzgerald’s work: the value of mid-round picks is much higher than in Johnson’s original chart. The duo proved 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 they allow 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. When one team has a more accurate way of assessing value, it can take advantage of more widely accepted valuations to achieve surplus value; think of the Oakland A’s success in the early aughts.

The problem arises when one or more teams want to deal for a player rather than a draft pick. Essentially: how many draft points is Cam Robinson worth?