The break even point (AV) of the Jalen Ramsay trade

Jalen Ramsay was traded from the Jaguars to the Rams for 1 2020 first round pick, a 2021 first round pick and a 4th round pick. The Rams have been a top 5 team the past couple years, so assuming the first rounders come out about 28th is reasonable. That would give the Jags two picks of approximate value 26 by the PFR charts. The fourth rounder, which we can estimate as pick 160 or so, is worth about 8 AV. This sums to about 60 AV.

So, the cost of the trade is very much close to that of Laremy Tunsil. And it will be interesting how these mid risk trades play out. The teams haven’t invested 90 or 100 AV in this venture. So will it work?

Jalen has averaged about 11 AV in his three seasons, and about 12 AV in his last two. Should he average 12 for the next five years (the Rams would have to resign him to make this work), then the trade breaks even.

 

The break even point of the Laremy Tunsil Trade

It was news when it happened. Laremy Tunsil and Kenny Stills were traded for Johnson Bademosi and Julia’n Davenport and a bundle of picks. We have done extensive analysis of draft trades using approximate value calculations. So how does the Laremy Tunsil trade rack up in the AV department?

Miami received 2 first round draft picks, one in 2020 and one in 2021. They also received a 2021 second round draft pick. As these have not been consumed, we can’t be precise about their value, but the Texans tend to be a second tier playoff team. There are 16 playoff teams, so valuing the first rounds at around 22 and the second rounder as 54 would put us into the right ball park.

Miami is likely to be dreadful for the next couple years so the 2020 fourth we can value around 130 and the sixth rounder about slot 200.

 

Laremy Tunsil Trade
Houston Texans		Miami Dolphins		Results
Pick	Average AV	Pick	Average AV	Delta AV	Risk Ratio
130	7	22	27
200	7	22	27
		54	21
Total	14	Total	75
				62	5.36

 

Because the chart does not include the people involved in the trade, the risk ratio is actually meaningless in this context. The real issue are the 62 AV given up for Laremy and Stills and whether they would be able to recover that value.

Laremy has averaged 6 or 7 AV so far in his first three seasons, so that’s not really all that helpful. We will look instead at the career of Andrew Whitworth of the LA Rams. In his first 11 years he totalled 104 AV, so a good left tackle can rack up, say, 10 AV a season (this would be about a 30% increase in productivity for Laremy). Laremy is going to have to do it for 6 seasons for the trade to break even.

Looking at Kenny Stills, he was used a lot in certain years with New Orleans and Miami, but he’s not young and he’s not being used much. If he could average 5 AV for 5 more season, he would be a substantial boost to the value of the trade, but I suspect he’s not going to be with Houston for long.

Update: overvalued the Texans picks in the first iteration of this article. That has been corrected.

 

Trades on day 1 of the 2018 Draft. AV analysis.

Bill traded up to pick 7 to get QB Josh Allen.

Josh Allen Trade
Buffalo Bills		Buccaneers		Results
Pick	Average AV	Pick	Average AV	Delta AV	Risk Ratio
7	32	12	35
		53	22
		56	19
Total	32	Total	76
				44	2.38

~~~
The Cards moved up to pick 10 to draft Josh Rosen
~~~

Josh Rosen Trade
Cardinals		Raiders		Results
Pick	Average AV	Pick	Average AV	Delta AV	Risk Ratio
10	41	15	28
		79	18
		152	9
Total	41	Total	55
				14	1.34

~~~
Saints move up to get Marcus Davenport, DE
~~~

Marcus Davenport Trade
Saints		Packers		Results
Pick	Average AV	Pick	Average AV	Delta AV	Risk Ratio
14	29	27	25
		147	8
		(25)	24
Total	29	Total	57
				28	1.97

~~~
Bills go up to get Tremaine Edmunds
~~~

Tremaine Edmunds Trade
Bills		Ravens		Results
Pick	Average AV	Pick	Average AV	Delta AV	Risk Ratio
16	32	22	27
154	12	65	21
Total	44	Total	48
				4	1.09

~~~
Packers trade again to get Jaire Alexander
~~~

Jaire Alexander Trade
Packers		Seahawks		Results
Pick	Average AV	Pick	Average AV	Delta AV	Risk Ratio
18	29	27	25
248	5	76	17
		188	5
Total	34	Total	47
				13	1.38

~~~
Titans trade up for Rashaan Evans
~~~

Jaire Alexander Trade
Packers		Seahawks		Results
Pick	Average AV	Pick	Average AV	Delta AV	Risk Ratio
18	29	27	25
248	5	76	17
		188	5
Total	34	Total	47
				13	1.38

~~~
Ravens trade 2019 assets to get their QB
~~~

Lamar Jackson Trade
Ravens		Eagles		Results
Pick	Average AV	Pick	Average AV	Delta AV	Risk Ratio
32	23	52	22
132	11	125	15
		(48)	25
Total	34	Total	62
				28	1.82

 

The Jets – Colts trade is one of the riskiest trades in recent history.

There are a number of ways to analyze a draft trade. You can do it by comparing the actual players selected (though that takes time), you can do it by trade value, as measured by a trade chart, or you can do it by using the Pro Football Reference statistic approximate value. There are charts of approximate value per draft choice and those charts can be used to calculate trade values and risk immediately.

The recent blockbuster trade by the Jets involves substantially more risk than the last five major trade ups in the NFL (here, here and here). To make these calculations I assume the Jet’s pick next year will be the 10th pick in the second round, hence the 42nd pick.

Trade for 3rd Pick
Jets		Colts		Results
Pick	Average AV	Pick	Average AV	Delta AV	Risk Ratio
3	45	6	39
		37	28
		49	20
		42	25
Total	45	Total	112
				67	2.49

 

With a risk ratio of 2.7 2,5, the risk incurred by the Jets is a bit less to what Washington put up with in the RGIII trade. It’s also comparable to the Earl Campbell trade. The last two trades were high risk – never paid back kinds of trades (though with Earl Campbell, the team’s competitiveness during his peak years may have been enough emotionally for the Oilers).

Update: recalculated risk, which now stands at 2.5 instead of 2.7.

 

The break even point of the three major 2017 QB draft trades

This would have been done earlier, but Pro Football Reference dropped its very handy chart of draft position versus AV. I started missing it more and more, and using the Wayback Machine I found it here.

The three major QB trades of 2017 were the trade for Mitch Trubisky, Patrick Mahomes, and Deshaun Watson. We will analyze them in sequence.

Mitchell Trubisky Trade
Chicago Bears		49ers		Results
Pick	Average AV	Pick	Average AV	Delta AV	Risk Ratio
2	46	3	45
		67	19
		111	12
		(71)	21
Total	46	Total	97
				51	2.11

 

The Bears have a trade risk comparable to a typical trade for a #1 draft choice and a quarterback at that. The trade has less fundamental risk than Goff or Wentz. The comparable that comes to mind is Eli Manning. By contrast, the delta AV of the other two trades are substantially less.

Patrick Mahomes Trade
Chiefs		Bills		Results
Pick	Average AV	Pick	Average AV	Delta AV	Risk Ratio
10	41	27	25
		91	17
		(25)	24
Total	41	Total	66
				25	1.61

 
Mahomes merely has to give six seven good years, and the trade ends up warranted. The issue in the case of Deshaun Watson is keeping him upright. A fistful of whole years almost as good as his freshman year in the NFL and he would end up bordering on Hall of Fame numbers.

Deshaun Watson Trade
Texans		Browns		Results
Pick	Average AV	Pick	Average AV	Delta AV	Risk Ratio
12	35	25	24
		4	44
Total	35	Total	68
				33	1.94

 

So here is wishing Deshaun Watson a healthy career from now on.

 

The AV cost of the 2016 Eagles-Browns trade.

I didn’t expect another trade of this magnitude, and so quickly. But let’s crunch the numbers on this trade, and compare them to the 2016 Titans-Rams trade.

The Browns received from the Eagles, the #8, #77 and #100 picks in this draft. In 2017 they receive the Eagles first round pick. In 2018 they receive the Eagles 2nd round pick. The Eagles have received the #2 pick in this draft, and the Browns 4th round pick in 2017.

For the purposes of this calculation, we assume the Eagles will pick 20th in 2017 and 2018, and that the Brown in 2017 will rise from 2nd to 10th.

 

The AV costs of the 2016 Eagles Browns trade.
Eagles		Browns		Results
Pick	Average AV	Pick	Average AV	Delta AV	Risk Ratio
2	46	8	40
(138)	8	77	12
		100	17
		(20)	29
		(52)	22
Total	54	Total	120
				66	2.22

 

The Delta AV for both trades are the same, but since the Eagles received a lot less AV, the relative ratio of AV given to AV received is higher. The trade cost is the same, but the purchase is more highly leveraged.

 

Assessing the break even point of the two Ricky Williams trades

There were, of course, two substantial trades of Ricky Williams. The first netted the Washington Redskins the whole of the Saints 1999 draft, plus the Saint’s first and third round picks of 2000. Three years later, Ricky was traded to the Miami Dolphins for a pair of first rounders, plus change. The first was obviously not paid off. How did the Miami Dolphins fare in their trade, using our new risk metrics?

Risk Ratio no longer makes sense as a term when you’re talking about someone already drafted. The important term becomes the net risk term, 52 AV. That’s 1 more AV than the typical #1 draft choice, and that’s the amount of AV Ricky had to generate in order for this trade to break even. And note, these calculations are derived from weighted career AV, not raw AV. So any raw AV we apply to these numbers is a rough approximation (A typical career summing to, say, 95 AV, might end up around 76 or so WCAV).

That said, Ricky Williams had a great first season with the Dolphins, generating 19 AV in that season alone. His total ended up somewhere around 57 AV. I’d suggest the second trade approximately broke even.

End notes: I’ve seen a lot of discussion around  this set of data, discussing the quality of draft picks on a per pick basis, posted in of all places, a Cav’s board. If this board isn’t the original source of these graphs, please let me know. An excellent resource for high quality NFL draft trade information is here. And finally, a reader named Frank Dupont writes:

I wrote a book about decision making in the NFL.  It’s sort of a pop science book because it seeks to make what happens in the NFL understandable via some work that people like David Romer, Richard Thaler, and Daniel Kahneman have done.  But because all pop science books make their point through narrative, I spend a lot of time looking at why football coaches are so old, but other game players like chess players and poker players are so young (Tom Coughlin is 65 and yet the #1 ranked chess player in the world is 21, the world’s best poker players are 25-ish).

The link for the book is here, if this topic sounds interesting to you. I’ll only note in passing  that while physics prodigies are common, biologists seem to hit their stride in their 60s.  Some areas of knowledge do not easily lend themselves to the teen aged super genius.

 

The break even points on the Eli Manning and Robert Griffin III trades.

In my last post, I introduced ways to determine the risk of NFL trades, using Pro Football Reference’s average AV per draft slot metric to assess the relative risk of the trade. I wish to continue the work done in the first post, by also taking a look  at the Eli Manning trades, and also the Robert Griffin III trades.

Eli's debt will be paid off in 2 more years of his current level of play.
RG3 will have to have a Sonny Jurgenson-like career, all in Washington, to pay off the value of the picks used to select him.

In the Eli trade, the New York Giants assumed a ‘AV debt’ comparable to that of Michael Vick, and a relative risk approximately the same as Michael Vick or Julio Jones. Looking, Eli has  rolled up perhaps 87 AV at this point, netting 12-15 AV a year. So, in two years, in purely AV terms, this trade would be even. Please note  that NFL championships appear to not net any AV, so if the value of the trade is measured in championships instead, I’d assume the New York Giants would consider themselves the outright winners of this trade.

The appropriate comparison with the Robert Griffin III trade is actually the Earl Campbell trade. The risk ratio is about the same, assuming the Washington Redskins go 8-8 and 9-7 the next two years, and end up with the #16 pick in 2013, and  the #20 pick in 2014. The lowest  value the AV Given column could total is 106, if the Washington Redskins ended up with the #31 pick twice. In any event, the Redskins are betting that RG3 will have a Sonny Jurgenson-esque career, and not just his Washington Redskin career, but his Eagles and Redskins career, in order to pay back the ‘AV debt’ that has been accrued by this trade.

 

Assessing the break even point of NFL draft trades

There were eight trades in the first day involving the first round of the 2012 NFL draft. Most of them involved small shifts in the primary pick, with third day picks added as additional compensation. The one outlying trade was that of the St Louis Rams and the Dallas Cowboys, which involved a substantial shift in  the #1 pick (from 6 to 14) and the secondary compensation was substantial. This high secondary compensation has led to criticism of the trade, most notably by Dan Graziano, whose argument, boiled to its essence, is that Dallas paid a 2 pick price for Morris Claiborne.

Counting  picks is a lousy method to judge trades. After all, Dallas paid a 4 pick price for Tony Dorsett. Was that trade twice as bad a trade as the Morris Claiborne trade?  The Fletcher Cox trade saw Philadelphia give up 3 picks for Fletcher Cox. Was that trade 50% worse than the Morris Claiborne trade?

In order to deal with the issues raised above, I will introduce a new analytic metric for analyzing trade risk, the risk ratio, which is the sum of the AV values of  the picks given, divided by the sum of the AV values of the picks received. For trades with a ratio of 1.0 or less, there is no risk at all. For trades with ratios approaching 2 or so, there is substantial risk. We are now aided in this kind of analysis by Pro Football Reference’s new average AV per draft pick chart. This is a superior tool to their old logarithmic fit, because while the data may be noisy, they avoid systematically overestimating the value of first round picks.

The eight first round trades of 2012, interpreted in terms of AV risk ratios.

The first thing to note about the 8  trades is that the risk ratio of 6 of them is approximately the same. There really is no difference, practically speaking, in the relative risk of the Trent Richardson  trade, or the Morris Claiborne trade,  or the Fletcher Cox trade. Of the two remaining trades, the Justin Blackmon trade was relatively risk free. Jacksonville assumed an extra value burden of 10% for moving up to draft the wide receiver. The other outlier, Harrison Smith, can be explained largely by the noisy data set and an unexpectedly high value of AV for draft pick 98. If you compensate by using 13 instead of 23 for pick #98, you get a risk ratio of approximately 1.48, more in line with the rest of the data sets.

Armed with this information, and picking on Morris Claiborne, how good does he  have to be for this trade to be break even? Well, if his career nets 54 AV, then the trade breaks even. If he has a HOF career (AV > 100), then Dallas wins big. The same applies to Trent Richardson. For the trade to break even, Trent has to net at least 64 AV throughout his career. Figuring out how much AV Doug Martin has to average is a little more complicated, since there were multiple picks on both sides, but Doug would carry his own weight if he gets 21*1.34 ≈ 28 AV.

Four historic trades and their associated risk ratios.

By historic measures, none of the 2012 first round trades were particularly risky. Looking at some trades that have played out in  the past, and one  that is still playing out, the diagram above shows the picks traded for Julio Jones, for Michael Vick, for Tony Dorsett, and also for Earl Campbell.

The Julio Jones trade has yet to play out, but Atlanta, more or less, assumed as much risk (93 AV) as they did for Michael Vick (94 AV), except for a #4 pick and a wide receiver. And although Michael is over 90 AV now, counting AV earned in Atlanta and Philadelphia, he didn’t earn the 90+ AV necessary to balance out the trade while in Atlanta.

Tony Dorsett, with his HOF career, paid off the 96 AV burden created by trading a 1st and three 2nd round choices for the #2 pick. Once again, the risk was high, the burden was considerable, but it gave value to Dallas in the end.

Perhaps the most interesting comparison is the assessment of the Earl Campbell trade. Just by the numbers, it was a bust. Jimmie Giles, the tight end that was part of the trade,  had a long and respectable career with Tampa Bay. That, along with the draft picks, set a bar so high that only the Ray Lewis’s of the world could possibly reach. And while Campbell was a top performer, his period of peak performance was short, perhaps 4   years. That said, I still wonder if Houston would still make the trade, if somehow someone could go back in to the past, with the understanding of what would happen into the relative future. Campbell’s peak was pretty phenomenal, and not entirely encompassed by a mere AV score.

 

Pro Football Reference’s 2012 draft preview chart

These are numbers that have been published before, but not presented as artfully as this. PFR has the average draft value of a draft pick on a per draft slot basis. They then find a representative player with that AV. Also, they’ve listed the best picks in the slot as well. Looking to pick a world beater?

The url for this page suggests that  the page is temporary. Hopefully it will become a permanent part of Pro Football Reference.

Update: The url has been removed from the Pro Football Reference site, but is available from the Wayback Machine here.