NFL Draft Pick Value Calculator (Trade Chart)

Background.

When two NFL teams swap draft picks, the haggling happens in points. Every selection has a number on a value chart, each side adds up what it is sending, and deals tend to close when the totals are close. The chart most teams have used for this is named after Jimmy Johnson, from his years coaching the Dallas Cowboys. It gives the first overall pick 3,000 points, the tenth 1,300, the last pick of round one 590, and the 224th and final pick of a seven-round draft just 2. It has no official standing, yet Massey and Thaler, in their 2013 study of the draft, report that every NFL team keeps such a table.

A price list is not the same as a measure of what the picks deliver. Chase Stuart built a second chart from Approximate Value, Pro-Football-Reference's single-number rating of each player season, so it reflects what players drafted at each slot went on to produce. It is much flatter at the top. On the Johnson chart the first pick is worth 2.31 times the tenth and 5.08 times the 32nd; on Stuart's it is worth 1.74 times the tenth and 2.77 times the 32nd.

That difference is the subject of Massey and Thaler's paper, The Loser's Curse: if the market prices early picks more steeply than their on-field output justifies, the team trading down tends to come out ahead. You can see it for yourself by entering a real trade and switching charts. Deals that land almost exactly level on the Johnson chart often tilt clearly towards the team that collected more, later picks once they are scored by production.

Both charts stop at pick 224, seven rounds of 32. Recent drafts have run past 250 selections because of compensatory picks, and anything after 224 scores zero on both charts. Players, future-year picks and conditions attached to a trade have no pick number, so they cannot be scored at all.

What is nfl draft pick value calculator?

A draft value chart assigns points to every overall selection so that packages of different sizes can be compared. The Johnson chart is a record of trade prices, descending from 3,000 at pick 1 to 2 at pick 224. Stuart's chart runs from 34.6 at pick 1 to 0.1 at pick 224 and is built from the Approximate Value that players taken in each slot went on to earn. Summing a side's picks on either chart gives its outlay; comparing two sides shows which one is paying more by that chart's measure.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01Choose the chart: Johnson for what the trade market would charge, Stuart for what the picks are expected to be worth on the field.
2. 02Enter the overall pick numbers the first team gives up, separated by commas, for example 6, 81. Use overall numbers, not round and slot: pick 33 is the first pick of round two, and pick 65 the first of round three.
3. 03Enter the picks the second team gives up in the second box, or leave it empty to value one package on its own.
4. 04Read the return percentage as the second team's package measured against the first team's. Between 95% and 105% is read as essentially even; above 105% the second team is paying more, below 95% the first team is.
5. 05Switch to the other chart and compare. A trade that is level on Johnson but well above or below 100% on Stuart is one where price and expected production point in different directions.

The formula.

Each pick number is looked up in the chosen chart, and the values for each side are added: V(A) is the total the first team sends and V(B) the total the second team sends. The difference is V(A) − V(B), so a positive number means the first team is giving up more. The return percentage is V(B) ÷ V(A) × 100. If the first team's picks are all beyond pick 224 and score zero, no ratio can be formed; the percentage is shown as 0 and the reading says why.

The chart values come from the nflverse draft_values dataset, which carries both charts for picks 1 to 262 and gives every pick after 224 a value of zero. Overall numbers from 1 to 262 are accepted, and any pick past 224 is named in the reading so you know it added nothing.

The two charts differ in shape most of all. The Johnson chart's first round is worth 37,065 points against 13,312 for the second round, nearly three to one. Stuart's chart puts round one at 587.8 and round two at 319.9, less than two to one. Massey and Thaler also found the market's pricing had grown steeper over time, with the tenth pick falling from 60% of the first pick's value to 39%.

One caution for late picks: both charts were laid out for a 224-pick draft, while in a modern draft compensatory selections at the ends of rounds three to seven push later overall numbers back, so a pick's number and its place within its round no longer line up as they did.

A worked example.

Frequently asked questions.

References& sources.

1. [1]Massey, C. & Thaler, R. H. (2013). 'The Loser's Curse: Decision Making and Market Efficiency in the National Football League Draft.' Management Science 59(7), 1479–1495. Source for the existence and provenance of the trade value chart ('All NFL teams have a table (sometimes called "the chart") that lists the value of each draft pick. The first pick is given a value of 3000...'), for the observation that the chart has grown steeper over time (the tenth pick falling from 60% to 39% of the first), and for the estimated 174% annual discount rate on future picks. Publisher landing page blocks non-browser clients; the working-paper PDF is cited.
2. [2]nflverse / nfldata — data/draft_values.csv. The machine-readable source of every pick value implemented on this page: column 'johnson' for the Jimmy Johnson trade chart and column 'stuart' for Chase Stuart's Approximate-Value chart, picks 1 to 262. Values were read programmatically from this file rather than transcribed. Spot values: pick 1 = 3000/34.6, pick 32 = 590/12.5, pick 224 = 2/0.1, pick 225 onward = 0 on both.
3. [3]nflverse / nfldata — data/trades.csv. Source of the worked example: the 27 April 2023 trade in which Detroit sent picks 6 and 81 to Arizona for picks 12, 34 and 168, recorded as an all-picks, same-season, non-conditional deal.
4. [4]Sports Reference LLC. Pro-Football-Reference glossary, entry for AV: 'approximate value. This is our attempt to put a single number on each player-season since 1960 so that we can (very approximately) compare across years and across positions.' The quantity Chase Stuart's chart is built from. Archived snapshot cited because the live page returns HTTP 403 to non-browser clients.