Value of High Draft Picks Can Be Misleading
Football
By MICHAEL DAVID SMITH
April 19, 2007
When Jimmy Johnson became coach and general manager of the Dallas Cowboys in 1989, he knew he wanted to build his team by trading for as many draft picks as he could acquire. But he lacked a method for assessing whether he was getting a fair deal when he traded draft choices: Is one first-round pick more valuable than two second-round picks?
So Johnson and his staff devised a chart that assigned a point value to each pick, with the first pick worth 3,000 points, the second pick worth 2,600 points and so on, all the way down to seventh-round picks worth just a point or two. With that chart guiding their decisions, the Cowboys would only agree to trades that gave them a positive point total.
The chart worked: The Cowboys usually fleeced opposing teams in trades, and they used the draft to build a team that won three Super Bowls.
The NFL is nothing if not a copycat league, and other teams soon hired Dallas scouts and assistant coaches to try to emulate the Cowboys' success. Soon the entire league used that chart to guide draft decisions. It's been almost 20 years since Johnson took over in Dallas, but when the NFL draft takes place on April 28, general managers will still consult Johnson's chart when considering whether to trade draft picks.
But the chart has a fundamental flaw: It was devised before the NFL had a salary cap. In 1989, NFL teams could pay their players as much as they wanted, but today every team has a maximum payroll of $109 million. And so instead of using the draft just to acquire good players, now teams also have to consider whether the players they draft are worth the salary cap space they'll occupy.
That consideration is especially important because the first few players drafted instantly become among the highest-paid players in the league. When the NFL slices up the salary pie, the portion it gives to highly drafted rookies is huge. As the first pick in last year's draft, Mario Williams received a six-year, $54 million contract with the Houston Texans.
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When bad teams like the Texans devote significant resources to unproven players like Williams, it defeats the whole purpose of having a draft: The draft is supposed to level the playing field by giving the worst teams first dibs on the best players, but the combination of the salary cap and inflated contracts for high draft picks means those high picks drag the worst franchises down even further if they don't choose wisely. Many NFL general managers wish the league would limit rookies to short-term contracts worth significantly less money than the top veterans make, like the NBA does.
The Oakland Raiders own the first pick in this year's draft, and the player they take will get a contract guaranteeing him about $30 million. Johnson's chart says the Raiders' first-round pick should be worth several later picks in a trade, but that's not necessarily true: Teams that are conscious of their salary cap status wouldn't want to trade up to the Raiders' pick and assume the cost of having to pay the salary of the first pick in the draft.
In recent years, when teams have traded draft picks, the team that moved up usually got the worse end of the deal. Look no further than the Giants, who acquired quarterback Eli Manning, the first pick in 2004, in a draft-day trade with the San Diego Chargers. It's too early to say whether Manning will ever become the quarterback the Giants thought he would when they gave up their first- and third-round picks that year and their 2005 first- and fifthround picks to acquire him. But it's not too early to say that the Chargers got the better end of the deal.
San Diego wound up with quarterback Philip Rivers as well as two Pro Bowlers in linebacker Shawne Merriman and kicker Nate Kaeding. They used the last of the picks to trade for Roman Oben, an offensive lineman who started 24 games in San Diego. Rivers looks like he'll be at least as good as Manning over the course of their NFL careers, but even if Manning is better than Rivers, he won't be better than all four of the Chargers' players combined.
But the high cost of rookie salaries isn't the reason the Chargers got the better end of their trade with the Giants. After all, Rivers makes almost as much money as Manning. The Chargers came out ahead in that deal because they made such wise use of the extra picks they received from the Giants. If the Chargers hadn't taken a player as good as Merriman (who led the league with 17 sacks last year), that trade wouldn't look so good for them.
Ultimately, Johnson didn't build the Cowboys into three-time Super Bowl champions because of his draft chart. Johnson made the Cowboys the best team in the league because he made smart decisions to draft Hall of Fame players like Troy Aikman and Emmitt Smith. Knowing which players will develop into superstars is the real secret to draft success, and that requires the kind of acumen for evaluating talent that no chart can provide.
Mr. Smith is a writer for FootballOutsiders.com.
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