What is the Jimmy Johnson trade value chart for NFL Draft picks? And is it still reliable?

Every April, a handful of NFL teams make trades involving some combination of draft picks for another team’s package of draft picks.

The deals seem straightforward on paper, right? Say one team trades its second- and third-round picks for another team’s first-round pick. How do they determine how much each pick is worth? Is the quantity of two lower picks worth the quality of one higher selection? And with no players yet attached to those picks, which team is getting better value?

Enter the trade value chart.

The most famous trade value chart was designed by legendary Dallas Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson. Successors have sought to fine-tune the formula of determining the value of each pick, but Johnson’s remains the most popularly referenced, even if it’s not exactly what NFL front office folks are using these days inside their draft war rooms.

Let’s take a look at Johnson’s original trade draft chart to see how it works, how reliable it is and why others have made changes.

How it works

The chart, which was devised by Johnson in the 1990s, assigns a point value to each pick in the draft. While much of it has become obsolete in the past three decades — thanks to changes in rookie-scale contracts and compensation picks — it popularized how teams and fans viewed the value of picks.

In the years since, newer charts have been adapted to the modern-day draft, and teams don’t all use the same values. Team officials have said their front offices have crafted in-house custom draft charts to fit their particular philosophies, but that doesn’t mean the charts are drastically different.

But before we explore a few popular alternatives, here are the draft slot values according to the Jimmy Johnson chart. (Slot values in parentheses)

What has changed with newer charts

The aforementioned change in the 2011 collective bargaining agreement introduced the rookie wage scale and completely changed the way teams value draft picks. With a cap on how much draft picks can make on rookie contracts, top picks have become even more valuable. Teams get high-pedigree players on low-priced deals for the first few years of their careers.

Factoring in compensatory picks (there were 34 given in 2024), the values on Johnson’s chart also change. With the first compensatory picks coming at the end of the third round, the first pick of the fourth round in 2024 is diminished to 96 points according to Johnson’s chart. Further compensatory picks diminish the first pick of the fifth round to 38 points, the first pick of the sixth round to 20.6 points and the first pick of the seventh round to 3 points for the 2024 draft.

History of the chart and modern-day alternatives

Geep Chryst’s chart: Chryst, a scout with the Jacksonville Jaguars, is credited with developing the original trade value chart in 1993 while working for the Chicago Bears. Bears coach Dave Wannstedt was looking for a tool that would help Chicago mimic the team-building philosophy Johnson was applying in Dallas, where Wannstedt was previously a defensive coordinator. Wannstedt eventually shared it with Johnson, who publicized the chart, while others shared copies around the league.

Rich Hill trade value chart: Hill’s chart may not be known by many fans or mentioned on many broadcasts, but it has become the most relied-upon chart by league analysts and most closely mirrors the general league philosophy when it comes to trading picks. Hill’s chart was put together after the 2011 CBA, so it values earlier picks differently. It was designed by analyzing years of trades, statistical information and historical trends.

Below is how Hill’s chart values first-round picks in 2024, entering the week of the draft.

Fitzgerald-Spielberger trade value chart: Designed by Jason Fitzgerald and Brad Spielberger of Over the Cap, this chart was put together by retroactively grading every draft pick from 2011 to 2015 at the end of their rookie contracts. They compared the players’ production to the value of their contracts to come up with their chart’s numbers, which are more of an approximate value for fans and the media to refer to.

Here’s how they describe their methodology: “In order to get a more accurate representation of the expected performance of a particular draft pick and increase the sample size, we smoothed the data by averaging out the post rookie-contract APY amounts for a few picks before and after each draft pick. The grouping of a few draft picks within a small range removed a lot of the variance that occurs in large part due to ‘busts’ and generated more realistic projections, as the range more accurately reflects the quality of talent available to a drafting team. The ranges start very small (e.g. examining picks No. 1 + No. 2 for the No. 1 slot) and expand in the later rounds of the draft.”

The Harvard trade value chart: If you love numbers, this is your chart. Designed by Kevin Meers — the director of Zelus Analytics and previously the Cleveland Browns’ director of research and strategy — the Harvard chart’s values were formulated by using the Career Approximate Value metric from Pro Football Reference. Looking at data for each player drafted from 1980 to 2005, Meers said Career Approximate Value makes his chart “a massive improvement over the old draft chart.”

“The old system massively overvalues the earliest picks and significantly undervalues mid-to-late round picks,” Meers said. Below are a few of the values from his chart.

Are teams’ charts similar?

As mentioned, NFL teams aren’t all using the same draft charts with the same values. That can make trades complicated, but not too complicated to get anything done.

Bill Belichick, the former New England Patriots coach, said chart differences have resulted in some heightened haggling, but those differences aren’t often a leading cause of a deal being shut down.

“I would say that, in general, the trades over the last several years, for the most part, have been, let’s call them within 5 to 10 percent, pretty equitable trades,” Belichick said in 2019. “So, for you to have a chart that’s different than the other 31 charts isn’t really that productive because now we’re just arguing about which chart.”

The coach went on to say the Patriots didn’t have many negotiation conflicts over chart differences, but that wasn’t necessarily the case a couple of decades prior.

“Now 10 or 15 years ago, there was some of that. ‘Oh, here’s what we think it should be.’ Well, the other team’s in a different ballpark because they’re looking at a different chart,” Belichick said. “I would say that when you look at the trades now, over the past few years, a majority of them fall within what we would say is a range of a fair trade.”

But when it comes to the more high-profile deals involving first-round picks, Belichick called those trades different, “because you’re trading for a very specific player at that point.”

“Not that you’re not trading for a player in the second and third round — I’m not saying that — when a team moves up, they move up to take a certain player that they want. But not everybody’s necessarily after that player, whereas in the first five, 10 picks, whatever it is, when you’re trading there, you’re trading for a certain guy. And when they trade out of it they know that they’re trading away from that player. It might be one or two players, but it’s a much more defined situation.”

(Photo: Focus on Sport / Getty Images)