NFL draft 2022 – Ranking the best in-draft trades and why the Eagles should not have traded up to No. 13

Trading down in the NFL draft remains one of the most obvious and fruitful edges in the game.

Teams routinely seem to rely on the outdated Jimmy Johnson chart to make these trades instead of charts that are actually based on how players perform out of each draft slot in the NFL. While we can quibble about the perfect composition of a draft value chart, virtually every empirically-based draft chart reliant on actual player performance — including our own — comes to the same conclusion: teams overpay to move up early in the draft.

NFL general managers with an itch to move up the board are basically Tobias Funke in this Arrested Development scene.

To be fair, it’s not that trading up early in the draft never works. But it never works on average. And so those GMs that consistently trade up (or consistently turn down offers for trading down) are hurting their team’s chances to win.

Another corollary: Basic strategy in blackjack tells us to stand on 13 against the dealer’s 5. It’s not that hitting on 13 in that scenario will never work, but it will never help your chances.

Our draft pick value chart is based on Pro-Football-Reference.com’s Approximate Value and is similar to work done by others, including Chase Stuart’s AV-based chart from 2013.

Today we’ll be using that chart to determine the five best pick-for-pick in-draft trades that occurred this year. Note the “pick-for-pick” part, so no A.J. Brown or Marquise Brown deal here, and the “in-draft” part, meaning no Saints-Eagles pre-draft deal (though I will say that was an absolute heist by Howie Roseman). The trades are graded by how much surplus value they created for the winning side.

Here are the top value trades from the 2022 draft:

The trade: Chiefs receive pick No. 21; Patriots receive picks Nos. 29, 94, 121
The value winner: Patriots (acquired 6.4 chart points, gave up 4.1)
Surplus value: Late second-round pick

Unless there’s a quarterback involved, I think it’s important to evaluate trades separate from the players…