Key takeaways
- Use a value chart to check what the market has historically charged for a pick, not what the player taken with it will be worth.
- Judge a pick by surplus value, what the player produces minus what he is paid, because pay falls steeply with draft position and production falls more gently.
- Price quarterback picks separately, since mixing them into one curve makes the top non-quarterback picks look more valuable than they have been.
- Remember the market's rule of thumb for future picks, a pick this year in round n for one in round n minus 1 next year, before trading either way.
A draft pick value chart gives every selection a number of points, so that two clubs can price a trade by adding up what each side gives away. The one most people mean is commonly called the Jimmy Johnson chart, and by the early 2000s curves like it were in wide use across the league. The best-known research on how clubs actually used such curves found that they priced the top of the draft far more steeply than the players picked there were worth. In Cade Massey and Richard Thaler's study of 276 draft-day trades from 1988 to 2004, the first pick cost as much as the 10th and 11th combined — yet the expected surplus of the first pick was lower than that of any pick in the second round. An analysis by Ben Baldwin, first published in 2023 and last updated in 2025, built on second-contract values for non-quarterbacks and found the same pattern under today's rookie pay rules.
This article explains what a chart does, what is actually known about where it came from, and what the research says about using one. It does not reproduce any club's or broadcaster's chart.
What a value chart does
The league treats picks as currency. Its draft rules describe each one as "an asset", with clubs free to "select a player or trade the pick", and trades can be agreed before and during the draft. Every club receives one pick in each of the seven rounds, plus any compensatory picks at the ends of rounds three to seven.
A chart turns those picks into points. Take an invented chart, made up for this example only:
| Pick | Points (hypothetical) |
|---|---|
| 8 | 100 |
| 15 | 65 |
| 40 | 30 |
| 47 | 25 |
A club holding pick 8 that is offered picks 15 and 40 sees 95 points against 100, so by the chart's standard it should ask for a small extra pick to close the five-point gap; offered 15 and 47 instead, it would be ten points short. Either way the chart has not said anything about the players. It has only said what this kind of trade has cost before. The steeper a chart falls, the more later picks it takes to buy an early one, and that steepness is the claim the research tested.
Where the chart came from
The documented origin is thinner than the folklore. Writing in 2005, Massey and Thaler noted that the use of a "value curve" had "caught on throughout the NFL in recent years". They record that the chart's namesake, described as "a former coach turned television commentator", had discussed such a curve during television coverage of the draft, and that ESPN.com posted a curve in 2003 that it described as representative of the curves teams use. That published curve closely matched the one the authors estimated from trades in 1997 to 2004.
They add one more detail from inside the league: an NFL team confirmed that "everybody has one" of these curves, and the one it shared was very close to their own estimate. The striking thing, in their reading, was how well ordered trade prices were — evidence of wide agreement among clubs about what picks are worth relative to one another.
What clubs actually paid
Massey and Thaler estimated the market price of picks from the trades themselves, and published the shape of the curve.
| Pick, relative to the first | 1988–1996 trades | 1997–2004 trades |
|---|---|---|
| 10th pick | 60% | 39% |
| 20th pick | 41% | 22% |
| 30th pick | 29% | 15% |
Three findings stand out.
- The curve was steep. Across their full sample, the first pick was valued as much as the 10th and 11th combined, and as much as the last four picks of the first round together. The last first-round pick was worth only about a quarter of the first.
- It was getting steeper. The second period's curve fell faster at every point in round one, which the authors describe as movement in the "wrong" direction.
- The future was heavily discounted. Clubs behaved as if a pick in round n this year equalled a pick in round n − 1 next year — 18 of the 26 one-for-one future-pick trades in their data followed that rule — implying a discount of about 174 percent a year.
High prices would be rational if early picks reliably produced proportionally better players. That is the question the second half of the paper answers.
What the players were worth
The authors compared each pick's price with its surplus value: the player's on-field value, estimated from what the open market pays veterans for similar performance, minus what the drafting club paid him. They valued performance using sixth-year salaries, after players have had a chance to test free agency, and measured surplus for drafted players in their first five seasons, using the 2000–2002 seasons.
Performance did fall with draft position — top picks were more likely to start, stay in the league and make the Pro Bowl. But it fell gently, while pay fell steeply: historically the first pick earned about 60 percent more on his initial contract than the seventh. Uncertainty was large even at the top. Over their first five years, first-round picks spent about as many seasons out of the league (8 percent) or without a single start (8 percent) as in the Pro Bowl (9 percent).
Put together, surplus value rose through the first round. The final first-round pick produced more surplus than the first on average, at a quarter of the trade price, and the authors conclude that "the first pick, in fact, has an expected surplus lower than any pick in the second round". They attribute the gap to familiar biases — overconfidence about telling stars from flops, the winner's curse in competitive bidding, and assuming rivals covet the same player.
Does it still hold under today's rookie pay?
The original study used trades from 1988 to 2004 and an older pay system. Today, the cost side is set by Article 7 of the 2020 collective bargaining agreement, which caps each rookie class's pay and allots it to clubs by "the number, round and position" of their picks. Rookie pay still falls with draft position, but under different rules.
Ben Baldwin's analysis on Open Source Football, last updated in May 2025, rebuilt the surplus curve for that world. It measures a pick's on-field value by the average yearly value of the player's second contract as a share of the cap, measures cost by the rookie contract's share, and leaves quarterbacks out entirely. His summary of the 1st overall pick: it "costs 4.1% of the salary cap", produces about 6.5 percent in expected value, and so carries a surplus of 2.4 percent — less than many later picks. On the history he is explicit: Massey and Thaler wrote "during the pre-2011 CBA when rookie contracts were a lot more expensive; however, the pattern still holds up now."
Two of his points matter for anyone using a chart:
- Quarterbacks distort the curve. Mixing them in makes a chart "much too rosy" about top picks that are not spent on a quarterback, because quarterbacks are very valuable and those drafted high have tended to succeed more often.
- Position matters. In his position curves, running backs and safeties sat lowest, and pass rushers and offensive tackles highest.
He also lists the method's limits: a second contract is an imperfect proxy for value, and the fifth-year option and the right to re-sign a player are not captured. Compared with that surplus curve, his verdict on the original chart is blunt — it "comes nowhere close to reflecting the true value of picks".
Using a chart without being used by it
None of this makes charts useless. It changes what they are for.
- Read a chart as a price list. It tells you what clubs have accepted before, which is useful in a negotiation, not what the player will become.
- Separate quarterback decisions. A curve built without them and a curve that includes them answer different questions.
- Count the salary as well as the points. Rookie pay is tied to slot, so an early pick costs more twice — in the trade and on the cap.
- Know the future-pick convention before using it. If the market prices next year's pick a round better than this year's, the patient side of that trade is buying at a discount.
- Prefer more chances to one big swing. The paper's starkest example: the first pick could, through trades, become as many as six mid-second-round picks, each worth more in surplus than the pick given up.
Those principles carry over to roster games. Football Franchise GM League extends control past draft day through its Franchise Mode and GM Mode, and the football draft simulator guide applies the same thinking — price what a choice costs against what it is likely to return. For building the board itself, see what makes a good draft board; for the order picks are made in, how draft order works; and for deciding whether this is a season to stockpile picks at all, rebuild versus retool. More drafting and management titles are in the sports GM games library, and related reading is collected on our American football hub.
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
What is a draft pick value chart?
Where did the Jimmy Johnson trade value chart come from?
Are top NFL draft picks overvalued?
What is the loser's curse in the NFL draft?
How are future draft picks valued in trades?
Sources
- Overconfidence vs. Market Efficiency in the National Football League (NBER Working Paper 11270), Cade Massey and Richard H. Thaler (opens in a new tab)National Bureau of Economic Research — accessed
- NFL Draft Value Chart: constructing surplus value from scratch, by Ben Baldwin (opens in a new tab)Open Source Football — accessed
- 2020 NFL-NFLPA Collective Bargaining Agreement (executed copy), Article 7: Rookie Compensation and Rookie Compensation Pool (opens in a new tab)National Football League and NFL Players Association (hosted by the NFLPA) — accessed
- NFL Draft Rules (opens in a new tab)NFL Football Operations — accessed
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