T10YL - 2014 NFL Draft, Part 1
A preamble followed by discussion of three trades (of 27 total)
Are you surprised to see that the NFL Draft was in May? The draft had been held in New York City in every season since 1965 and had settled into a consistent home at Radio City Music Hall for the prior eight years, but increasing fan interest and larger crowd sizes induced questions as to whether the event would need to move to a larger venue in the future. When a scheduling conflict required the NFL to push the draft back by two weeks, it might have been the last straw. This was the final NFL Draft held in New York City (the location has rotated annually since) and the only time the draft hasn’t been in April since 1984 (it was May 1-2). To find a start date as late as May 8, we need to go back to 1966, when the Draft was held on November 27, and that’s an egregious stretch because the 1966 Draft was held on November 27, 1965.
But it does permit me to talk about the 1966 Draft as a means of pointing out just how anomalous it was for the Draft to be outside of its “last weekend in April” window. The 1966 NFL Draft was one of two football drafts that took place that day, since the American Football League had yet to merge with the NFL and each league was still conducting a separate draft. The third pick of the 1966 NFL Draft was Dick Leftridge, a fullback from West Virginia who only played four games with the Pittsburgh Steelers in his one-year NFL career. The sixth overall pick was Charlie Gogolak, who was (1) a placekicker (2) born in Hungary (3) selected out of Princeton University, none of which are traits we associate with sixth overall picks in today’s NFL.
Critically, it doesn’t look like any of the picks from the 1966 NFL Draft were traded (I’m not sure about this, but my point works better if you assume that’s accurate). And if the NFL Draft consisted of nothing but teams selecting players in a pre-determined list, with the only excitement being the relative placement of players, it might not be the media phenomenon we know today. But the possibility of a draft pick trade introduces endless amounts of entropy into the process. Even if your team isn’t on the clock right now, all it takes is a couple of phone calls for that to change.
Draft trades are unique because, at the time the trades are being made, the picks are something more like a commodity than a player. It would be pretty nonsensical to evaluate player trades by adding a bunch of numbers together, but several pseudoscientific charts exist that allow you to do just that with NFL draft picks. The original draft pick chart was the Jimmy Johnson chart, developed by the then-coach of the Dallas Cowboys in the 1990s. Since then, the financial rules of the NFL have changed enough that this chart is not remotely accurate, but it persists as the most commonly-referenced value chart.
But we’re analyzing twenty-seven trades; each scale that get referenced creates twenty-seven new instances of work. Besides, since each further use of the Johnson chart legitimizes its use as “the most popular chart;” the only way to fight this is for individuals to take a stand. We’re going to stick to two more contemporary versions that have some interesting differences between them. The Rich Hill chart is named after its developer (not baseball’s Rich Hill, to my knowledge), who first put the chart together in 2017 based on an analysis of pick-for-pick trades since the 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreement introduced the current rookie contract structure. The Fitzgerald-Spielberger chart is named after its two developers and was created by retroactively grading every draft selection from 2011 to 2015 based on player performance over the course of their rookie contract. We will calculate who “won” each trade (based on each of the two charts) and then calculate their winnings by converting their points of surplus draft capital back into a draft pick that would be worth that many points.
You will note that the Fitzgerald-Spielberger chart consistently favors the team trading down, while the Rich Hill chart is more balanced. This is because these charts don’t really make the same measurement; while the Rich Hill chart is calculated to evaluate what draft picks are worth on the trade market, the Fitzgerald-Spielberger chart calculates a pick’s value based on the players that ultimately get selected at those draft positions. In a rational market where NFL teams accurately value each draft pick in making trades, we would expect these values to be similar — teams should trade draft picks based on the on-field value they expect to derive from those draft picks. But, in 2005, economics professor Richard Thaler and business professor Cade Massey published a paper detailing how NFL teams systematically overvalue high draft picks and the attendant “right to choose.” Their data clearly indicates that teams should be trading down whenever there is a chance to pick up more draft assets, since whether a player is going to be better than the next guy selected at their position is only slightly better than a coin flip (a 53% chance, specifically).
But the NFL draft is “an absolute petri dish for every cognitive bias underneath the sun.” NFL teams each invest thousands of man-hours into scouting draft prospects in order to make the best decisions possible. Rationally and empirically, it’s impossible to deny that the NFL draft is a crapshoot where players get selected in an egregiously wrong order year after year. But while each team may be able to accept that about the process writ large, it’s much harder to accept that about your process, especially when you’re seated in a conference room with a dozen colleagues who have devoted the past eight months of their lives to learning everything they can about this year’s crop of 21-year-olds. The effective result is that every NFL team has too much confidence in their ability to make the right pick, so the trade value that teams place on each pick (reflected by the Rich Hill chart) diverges from the actual value teams tend to receive from each pick (reflected by the Fitzgerald-Spielberger chart).
It’s reasonable to question whether it’s fair to assess NFL decisionmakers utilizing draft value charts that didn’t exist at the time of the 2014 NFL Draft; while NFL teams were probably looking at some sort of value chart, it obviously wasn’t these yet. But our goal at Trades Ten Years Later is to accurately look back on trades using the full swath of information available to us. With the same justification, we’ll be calculating the value of future draft picks (trades that sent away 2015 draft choices) based on the actual position of the picks that were conveyed. This is going to result in two departures from how these picks were valued at the time of the trade: (1) we know how the team trading a future pick finished the next season and which draft picks they received as a result, which may have been much higher or lower than people expected, and (2) we won’t be applying any sort of time-value discount to future draft picks. Future-year draft picks are generally traded at a discount compared to current-year draft picks, but since these are all “past-year” draft picks from our perspective, I’m fine with this logic.
While draft picks can be considered a commodity in the sense of fungibility, they are lumpy in value and distributed irregularly. You can’t just exchange your second-round pick for four fourth-round picks in order to make change for future trades, you have to trade from the arsenal that you have. Teams are aware that they won’t receive offers worth precisely 300 points in exchange for their 300-point pick because each trade counterparty has limited denominations of draft pick currency. It’s best to look at these numbers as directional approximations rather than values you can take to the bank.
With this preamble out of the way, let’s get into some trades. We’ll provide context for the rest of the draft by sprinkling in the names of other selections throughout.
ROUND ONE
Houston Texans select Jadeveon Clowney #1 overall.
St. Louis Rams select Greg Robinson #2 overall.
Jacksonville Jaguars select Blake Bortles #3 overall.
TRADE ONE
The Traded Picks: Buffalo Bills receive: #4 overall. Cleveland Browns receive: #9 overall, 2015 1st round pick (became #19 overall), 2015 4th round pick (became #115 overall).
Pick Trade Value (Rich Hill): Bills receive: 491. Browns receive: 387 + 278 + 26 = 691.
Surplus draft capital accumulated by Cleveland (200) roughly equivalent to 29th overall pick (=202).
Pick Trade Value (Fitzgerald-Spielberger): Bills receive: 2297. Browns receive: 1887 + 1508 + 595 = 3990.
Surplus draft capital accumulated by Cleveland (1693) roughly equivalent to 13th overall pick (1700).
The 2014 Draft featured a prebuilt cautionary tale about trading future first-rounders, with the Rams wielding the second overall pick thanks to Washington’s terrible season and their trade of 2013 and 2014 1st-rounders to move up to #2 and select Robert Griffin III in the 2012 Draft. When you’re trading away a future first-round pick, you want to be really sure that it’s not going to be a top pick. Buffalo had no reason to harbor this belief, as they were currently riding a ten-year streak of losing seasons. They had been bad enough for a top-10 draft pick in every preceding season since 2008 (they were only bad enough to get the 11th pick in the 2009 Draft). The potential for disaster was clear and obvious.
In spite of this, the Bills were discussed as a trade-up candidate and openly discussed the idea of trading up with the media, even as GM Doug Whaley indicated that the Bills were well-positioned to avoid reaching on a draft pick because they had needs at so many positions. These sentiments seem inconsistent, but are more easily explained in the broader context of Doug Whaley’s job security. Longtime Bills owner Ralph Wilson had died a couple of months before the draft and the team would soon be sold to new ownership. If nothing changed, that owner would inherit a laughingstock team that had not made the playoffs in the 21st century. It’s reasonable to assume that an incoming owner would want to fire the general manager of such an organization shortly after they gained the power to do so. The time to win, for this regime, was now or never.
The gambit ended up going okay. Buffalo missed the playoffs, but only gave away pick #19 after breaking their decade streak of losing seasons with a 9-7 record. Doug Whaley was able to keep his job for a couple more seasons. Coach Doug Marrone didn’t, but that’s only because he had a slick clause that allowed him to opt out of his contract as a result of an ownership change while still collecting his 2015 salary in full.
It’s notable that even the trade-neutral Rich Hill value chart thinks the Bills got rinsed in this trade. The most even and straightforward trade from #4 to #9 that the Bills could’ve made would’ve given up their 2nd-round pick at #41 — still a slight overpay, but less egregious (and possibly not accepted by Cleveland). But for an organization thinking with a one-year lifespan, the 2014 2nd-round pick is worth more than the 2015 1st-round pick. This is true only in 2014 and demonstrably false every year thereafter; the kind of asset stewardship that a living owner would be likely to disavow. If you realize you’re in negotiations with a counterparty who is completely discounting the value of their future assets, you should probably ask them for another future asset just for fun. The Browns must’ve figured out the game, because they also snagged a 2015 4th-round pick that they had no business picking up.
The Selected Players: Buffalo Bills select: Sammy Watkins. Cleveland Browns select: Cameron Erving and Ibraheim Campbell, #9 overall subsequently traded.
It’s a good news / bad news situation and there’s not much good news, so let’s get it out of the way quickly. Buffalo selected the consensus top prospect at the wide receiver position and moved up past a few teams that might’ve taken him instead. Sammy Watkins was an excellent athlete and was seen as the rare type of receiver worth trading up for. Watkins was an All-American in his true freshman season at Clemson (the fourth person to accomplish this in college football history after Herschel Walker, Marshall Faulk, and Adrian Peterson) and was an All-American again in his junior season before declaring for the draft. He was still just 20 years old at the time of this pick. In his rookie season, Watkins set new records for receptions (65) and yards (982) by a Bills receiver, then posted his first 1,000 yard season in 2015.
The “good news” portion has concluded. Injuries accumulated during Watkins’ 2015 season and became freaky shortly thereafter, with his 2016 season impacted by a small broken bone in his foot that required surgery (and was reported in May for some reason, long after the season had ended). A second surgery was ultimately required in January of 2017, with the Bills once again optimistic that he’d recover in time for training camp. But in August, Buffalo traded Watkins to the Rams along with a 6th-round pick for a 2nd-round pick and EJ Gaines (who the Rams would select with their 6th-round pick in the present draft). Watkins had two good seasons in Buffalo, one for each 1st-round pick used to select him, plus a fractional third season that roughly equates to the 4th-round pick. There were five receivers selected in this draft who made a Pro Bowl during their careers and Sammy Watkins is not among them.
The “bad news” portion continues as we examine the other side of the ledger. The Browns would trade the #9 pick in the next deal we discuss, and they ended up turning their 2015 1st-round and 4th-round picks into players that sound less exciting than their draft value. Cameron Erving converted from defensive tackle to offensive tackle while in college at Florida State, then was moved around the line in Cleveland, starting four games in his rookie year at left guard. When Alex Mack left the Browns that offseason, Erving was transitioned to center despite never playing the position previously. It didn’t go well, and he was traded to Kansas City for a 5th-round pick before the 2017 season. Ibraheim Campbell was a defensive back who didn’t get quite as much play time as Erving during his Browns tenure, but lasted until midway through the 2017 season. But on November 8, he suffered a hamstring injury during a practice and on November 9, he was waived.
As we continue through the first round, we get to engage in the time-honored post-draft tradition of laughing at all the players the Bills could’ve taken instead.
Oakland Raiders select Khalil Mack #5 overall.
Atlanta Falcons select Jake Matthews #6 overall.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers select Mike Evans #7 overall (this one is probably the most painful).
TRADE TWO
The Traded Picks: Cleveland Browns receive: #8 overall. Minnesota Vikings receive: #9 overall, #145 overall.
Pick Trade Value (Rich Hill): Browns receive: 406. Vikings receive: 387 + 13 = 400.
Surplus value accumulated by Cleveland (6) equivalent to a mid 6th-round pick (#187-194).
Pick Trade Value (Fitzgerald-Spielberger): Browns receive: 1946. Vikings receive: 1887 + 478 = 2365
Surplus value accumulated by Minnesota (419) equivalent to a late 5th-round pick (#163).
Rich Hill loves the contrast between the Browns trading down and trading up. First-round draft picks are basically spots in a line, and the Browns took five steps back when they went from #4 to #9. They were compensated generously for doing so. Then, they were able to get one of those five steps back for pocket change. This isn’t even that negative of an assessment from the Fitzgerald-Spielberger perspective; we’re going to see trades in the middle rounds that involve giving up more value than Cleveland surrendered here. So far, the Browns are giving us a master class in how to manage and deploy your draft capital.
The Selected Players: Cleveland Browns select: Justin Gilbert. Minnesota Vikings select: Anthony Barr, David Yankey.
Unfortunately, you need to select good players with your draft picks for them to be worth something.
Football Reference has a stat called Approximate Value (AV) that seems like it was designed for this kind of exercise. AV is intended to provide a general shortcut to discussing how much value a player provided to their team in a season based on their play. If they were an excellent starter on a championship team, that’s worth more than being an okay starter on that championship team, which is worth more than being an okay starter on a mediocre team, which is worth more than barely getting into the game for that mediocre team. AV attempts to tease out these layers and distinctions to provide an easily digestible way of assessing how much a team benefited from having a player around.
When I say that Justin Gilbert played two seasons in Cleveland before he got traded for a 6th-round pick, while Anthony Barr made four Pro Bowls in Minnesota, it’s pretty clear that you’d rather have Barr than Gilbert. That’s an easy one. But when I say that Justin Gilbert’s AV in Cleveland was “3” while Anthony Barr’s AV in Minnesota was “60,” the subtle punch you feel in your gut more accurately reflects the pain that Cleveland brought upon themselves by trading up. Justin Gilbert had performed well in college and seemed to have all the necessary physical tools, but simply could not play cornerback at the NFL level. He was traded to Pittsburgh after just two seasons and only played eleven more defensive snaps in his career.
Anthony Barr had a statue of himself made out of Subway sandwich in the leadup to this draft. I already told you that he made four Pro Bowls; those came between 2015-2018. I don’t think I’m qualified to discuss the finer points of his linebacker play beyond pointing out that he was good; suffice to say Barr re-signed with the team after his rookie contract expired and he played for the Vikings through the 2021 season. After one season spent in Dallas, he went back to Minnesota for a few games at the end of last season. His contribution last year (one tackle in four games) was enough to push his career AV as a Viking from 60 to 61, moving him out of a tie with Adam Thielen et al. at 55th on the all-time Vikings career leaderboard and into a tie with Steve Hutchinson et al. at 51st on the all-time Vikings career leaderboard.
David Yankey never got into a game for Minnesota. His last name is pronounced like “yankee,” but he’s from Australia. Incredibly disappointing.
Detroit Lions select Eric Ebron #10 overall.
Tennessee Titans select Taylor Lewan #11 overall.
New York Giants select Odell Beckham Jr. #12 overall.
St. Louis Rams select Aaron Donald #13 overall.
Chicago Bears select Kyle Fuller #14 overall.
Pittsburgh Steelers select Ryan Shazier #15 overall.
Dallas Cowboys select Zack Martin #16 overall.
Baltimore Ravens select C.J. Mosley #17 overall.
New York Jets select Calvin Pryor #18 overall.
Miami Dolphins select Ja’Wuan James #19 overall.
TRADE THREE
The Traded Picks: New Orleans Saints receive: #20 overall. Arizona Cardinals receive: #27 overall, #91 overall.
Pick Trade Value (Rich Hill): Saints receive: 269. Cardinals receive: 216 + 44 = 260.
Surplus value accumulated by New Orleans (9) equivalent to a late 5th-round pick (#165-173).
Pick Trade Value (Fitzgerald-Spielberger): Saints receive: 1482. Cardinals receive: 1330 + 714 = 2044.
Surplus value accumulated by Arizona (562) roughly equivalent to a mid-late 4th-round pick (#123 = 561).
This trade provides a divergence between the chart values and does so with a bang. Rich Hill views this as a savvy trade-up for the Saints, only surrendering a late third-round pick to jump seven first-round spots. But the value of first-round picks in the Fitzgerald-Spielberger view plummets in short order; while NFL teams still treat picks like #20 and #27 as “first-round picks,” this is only because there are 32 NFL teams. In reality, the players selected here are never in the first-tier of prospects and seem to be more interchangeable than teams would like to believe. Since the Fitzgerald-Spielberger calculation would even out for both sides if the Cardinals were also sending back pick #123, we can make the inference that moving up the seven spots from 27 to 20 is worth about as much on this chart as moving up the 32 spots from 123 to 91.
The Selected Players: New Orleans Saints select: Brandin Cooks. Arizona Cardinals select: Deone Bucannon, John Brown.
The Saints were probably happy with the decision to trade up. They selected Brandin Cooks out of Oregon State University as the fourth WR selection of the first round. Cooks ended a hot streak of WR selections (Watkins, followed by Mike Evans, then Odell Beckham Jr.) and kicked off a cold streak (Kelvin Benjamin, Marqise Lee, Jordan Matthews, and Paul Richardson were the next four selections at the position). After a broken thumb cut his rookie season short, Cooks was a 1,000-yard receiver for New Orleans in the 2015 and 2016 seasons. The final season introduced discord into Cooks’ relationship with the Saints, culminating in a trade to the Patriots ahead of the 2017 season. But even then, Cooks returned substantial value to the Saints in the form of new draft capital, with an outgoing 4th-round pick (#118 overall) attached to bring back a 1st-round pick (#32 overall) and 3rd-round pick (#103 overall). By trading up for a pick worth 269 points in the Rich Hill model, New Orleans was able to get 2.5 great seasons of Brandin Cooks and 193 points back in surplus draft capital. No team would complain about that outcome, and it looks even more impressive given how comprehensively Cooks has hit. He’s still a productive NFL receiver, with eight touchdown catches for the Cowboys in the 2023 season. I need to stop talking about him because he’s been traded more than any NFL player and I’m going to run out of material for posts over the next decade if I don’t conserve it.
But Arizona’s return shows how easy it can be to get value back when you’re trading down. With the 27th pick, the Cardinals took Deone Bucannon out of Washington St. Bucannon played safety in college and in his rookie season with Arizona, but transitioned to linebacker thereafter. Bucannon was an effective starter in 2015 and 2016 and had his fifth-year option picked up by the team, but an ankle injury at the end of the 2016 season caused him to miss games in every season thereafter. During his five seasons with the Cardinals, he put up an Approximate Value of 32 for the Cardinals, compared to an AV of 25 for Cooks in his three seasons with New Orleans.
You’d rather have Cooks on your team than Bucannon, but it gets closer when you factor in the impact of John Brown, taken with the 91st pick. Brown wasn’t as good of a receiver prospect as Cooks and didn’t have quite as good of an NFL career, but profiled similarly and was overqualified in his effective role, for our purposes, as “poor man’s Brandin Cooks.” By the ninth game of his NFL season, Brown had caught five touchdown passes, four of which were go-ahead, game-winning touchdowns. He would ultimately catch 17 touchdowns and 173 passes in his four seasons in Arizona before departing at the end of his rookie contract.
The Saints traded up about as well as possible here – they surrendered less draft capital than would be expected, took the last good player at his position before a series of busts, and flipped Cooks for more draft picks before his contract expired. Even still, you could argue that Arizona came out ahead by picking up two contributors instead of one. Deone Bucannon and John Brown’s Cardinals AVs of 32 and 21, respectively, give them a combined score of 53, 39 of which came in the first three seasons of their Cardinals tenure (compared to the 25 AV from Cooks’ three seasons in New Orleans). This line of argument completely collapses once you reincorporate the 1st-round pick received in exchange for Cooks, which the Saints used to select All-Pro tackle Ryan Ramczyk (73 AV as a Saint), but it’s a fun discussion until then.
Parts 2 and 3 of our 2014 NFL Draft recap will be posted over the next two days. Just 24 more trades to go!
Great stuff here. I especially enjoy the discussion of the different ways to value trades.
Surely the Fitzgerald criteria is better right? It makes sense to me to value draft pick trades in terms of the players that those picks are liable to turn into, instead of just what the trade market has said they were worth before.
I think the Rich Hill (can we just pretend it's the pitcher?) criteria is good for valuing your GM, and how good he is at this particular aspect of his job, but ever since it came out, when looking at trades my default is always Fitzgerald to see if we've won or lost.
Is this the right way of thinking?