Draft Pick Trades: Who Is Good at Them, Who Stinks at Them
This goes up Thursday, only a few hours before the start of the 2026 NFL Draft. That’s 257 picks spread across 32 teams, in an order that was set more or less the day last season ended. Except not really, because teams keep moving those picks here and there like they’re Pokemon cards or POGs or whatever collector’s item was hot when you were a kid.
Already, 85 of the 257 picks have changed hands at least once, including four (6. 182, 6. 198 and 6.
211) that have made five stops already. Trades are obviously a huge part of the NFL Draft. And as much as draft picks are like lottery tickets, trades for draft picks are that times 10.
So today, before we see how teams have fared in their draft pick trades. I went back through the last 10 years of drafts and examined every single trade that involved a draft pick (this, uh, took a while). I scored every trade using Pro Football Reference’s Approximate Value metric, which — even PFR will admit this — is not an exact or comprehensive science.
Any one score should be taken with several enormous grains of salt. But over a large scale, in the aggregate, it gets fairly informative. There are plenty of technical things here about how the picks and trades are classified and categorized, but rather than bogging down this already-riveting introduction with all of it right here, I’ll put some process notes at the bottom.
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