Photo: Brian Lynn/Icon Sportswire

The first handful of picks in the 2025 NFL Draft were pretty chalky in terms of who was picked in what order, but not in terms of which teams took those picks.

The Jaguars offered up essentially a 2026 first round pick and a second rounder (with some late-round picks going both directions as well) for the privilege to select Colorado’s Travis Hunter with the second overall pick. 

A lot had been made about the fact that each team owned its first round pick at the start of the draft, which hadn’t happened in modern NFL history. I know at least one person (me) thought that there had been somewhat of a reckoning with how teams had viewed those picks, because there had been only one draft-pick-for-draft-pick trade involving a future first rounder over the previous three drafts (the Texans moving up for Will Anderson Jr.)

However, this first round featured both the Hunter deal and a later trade where the Falcons landed edge rusher James Pearce Jr. Atlanta moved up 20 spots to get back into the first round, which cost them next year’s first.

Why might I have taken the relative lack of such deals as an indication that teams have re-evaluated their stance on trading future first round picks? In part because the math is pretty hard to reconcile.

At SIS we have a model for draft pick value, which is based on our Total Points player value system. Using that model, we can compare the projected four-year value of each pick to approximate how fair a draft-pick-only trade was.

Models of draft pick value generally agree that trading up is bad practice. Teams pay a premium over a fair deal to “get their guy”, when there isn’t that much certainty about whether any one player will pan out over another (with similar grades at least). 

Taking the first round trades over the last handful of drafts, the average trade involving only current picks involved moving up 5 slots and cost 24 Total Points of excess expected production over the next four years. That’s the equivalent of what you’d expect for the 109th pick, an early fourth-rounder. If a team truly had more certainty in the production or fit for a player, then that extra value should exceed that premium they’re paying compared to a fair deal.

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to ignore the potential imbalance there, the whole “always trade down” thing. Let’s just say that’s the cost of doing business if you want to trade up.

Those trades are apples-to-apples though. Future picks have an (understandable) implied discount relative to current picks, so the math gets funkier.

There have been nine trades in the first round involving future picks over the last five drafts. We can’t do the same math as we did for the other trades, because there’s a discount rate that we need to build in, but we don’t know what that is. 

What we can do, though, is try to infer what the discount rate would need to be to make the deal fair by the standards of trades teams make. 

One way we might conceive of this (using the data we have available) is to say that a future pick is worth one less year of production than the equivalent pick in the current year. If we compare pick values over four years to those over three years for the same pick, first rounders are worth about 72 percent of their current value a year later.

But if we use a discounting function like that, the excess value given by teams trading up is much higher than that of current-pick-only trades. Instead of a fourth-rounder, teams would be averaging giving up an early second-rounder in value. And that checks out, considering trading anything close to an additional current first round pick to move up a handful of spots is excessive.

So what rate are teams actually using (roughly)? If we try to tune the discount rate so that the excess value for future-pick trades matches with what we see with current-pick trades, future picks are discounted to just one-third of their current counterparts. 

In a world where a front office doesn’t have a ton of confidence that they’ll be around for more than a year or two it does make sense to discount the future a bit, but to assume a loss of more than half the value in the span of a year feels like a bit much.

To me, teams trading next year’s first round pick should have to answer multiple of these questions in the affirmative:

– Are you acquiring a known-quantity star player?

– Are you a great team with a high chance of that pick being in the back end of the round?

– Are you getting a top 10 pick, and moving up more than 10 picks?

– Are you getting additional value back that mitigates the cost?

That last bit I added to account for the Falcons’ trade for Pearce, because by our math this deal actually works out in favor of Atlanta, which is the only one in this sample that can claim such a thing.

Of course, the market bears what the market bears, and the team moving down has to agree to it. But that’s the sort of calculus I’d want to see teams adopting when mortgaging the future.