“Attempting” to maximize value by trading away picks for “perceived” superior talent/fit is DEFINITELY a viable way of doing business. Then there is separate and quite different philosophy of picking the Best Player Available on your board. This is done to mitigate your chances WHEN, not IF your “perception” of a better talent worth shedding picks…. was wrong.
You can believe that. It’s your right. I won’t say it’s asinine to believe it. You do you. I guess no GMs favor sticking to their board and BPA is just anything you want it to be. Was the Ricky Williams trade a BPA philosophy? Go ahead and explain how that was. To Mike Ditka Ricky’s VALUE was worth shedding an entire draft full of picks. In your view, he drafted with a BPA philosophy right??
No, not necessarily. Because I personally don’t agree with using a strict BPA philosophy, just like BH doesn’t, no matter what he says.
If 3rd round talent in draft X is really 4th round talent in any other draft, I’m fine shedding picks in draft X to move up and get 3rd round talent in the late second round. If draft Y has first round talent bleeding into the mid-2nd, and I have a high second round pick and dudes I love are going to be there 5 picks down, with no exceptional fits where I’m at, then yes I trade down if I can. This is called FLEXIBILITY and targeting players and values. What it is not is taking emotions out and taking the next highest ranked player on the board. I know WHY so many are fighting this. It’s because BPA sounds more pragmatic than I love this dude so eff them 2 next years 3rd rounders I’m getting a TesLaa!!
Uh yea…for the reason you just said. If I have a player graded so high that all I care about is him then yes that’s absolutely bpa because on my board he’s the only one that matters. I would gladly trade an entire draft for a marino, Megatron, Barry etc. For all we know Ditka board could’ve been Williams and nobody else.
The only way Brad uses the BPA philosophy is if BPA stands for
Brad’s Pulsating Addiction.
More or less. Mathematically speaking, maximizing Expected Value leads to maximizing Actual Value… over the long haul.
Air quotes aside, Expected Value (EV) isn’t the same as Actual Value (AV) let alone Maximum Value (MV). Think of buying a lottery ticket. The EV represents the payoff with respect to the odds, the cost, and the various payouts. This value is a negative fraction given how lotteries are constructed. Because of the odds, AV is also typically negative – the cost of the ticket, with no payout. The MV is the jackpot, of course. In this scenario, buying more tickets is most likely to increase your losses. Over the long haul, you will lose money, even if you occasionally win. The correct strategy is not to play.
Now, the NFL draft has already covered the cost of the picks (lottery tickets), they’re given out for free. You get 7 of them every year, plus some compensatory picks under certain conditions. We can assign EV to every pick, based on historical data. In this game, you’re always getting “some value” for each pick – you always get to draft a player – but in this scenario your Actual Value is dependent on how your draft class matches up to everyone else’s draft class. So you can still get negative value by selecting players who lose against the competition. There’s a cost to drafting bad players, they lose when playing against good players. And you’re much more likely to draft bad players in the later rounds.
For an optimal draft strategy, drafting good players isn’t sufficient. You must also avoid drafting bad players.
Your strictly defined “BPA” philosophy of “never trade, just take the next guy on your board” (a definition exclusive to you, btw) doesn’t actually “mitigate chances.” Rather, it guarantees over the long haul that you will end up with less value, by drafting more bad players. Only in the short term might it raise the floor of “value” but at the cost of lowering the ceiling of “value.” This is the same as playing the lottery.
FYI – you might find more traction if you concede that your definition of a “BPA philosophy” is not accepted by anyone else, and hence leads to much confusion. When GMs – and Denizens – talk about taking BPA, they don’t mean what you mean; they mean they’re not sacrificing a superior football player in order to fill an immediate need with a lesser football player, regardless of trades. Sticking to your definition is not a hill you should die on. You are lowering your expected and actual value by continuing in this vein.
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You clearly have a keen understanding of value math, thanks for posting that. Enjoyed reading it thoroughly.
I think we can also see in practice how accumulating picks, historically, isn’t an appreciably better strategy either. Belichick was famous for believing this way, and yet also had notoriously awful draft classes over the last decade of his tenure. They remained successful while Brady was still there, and for as bad as he was drafting he worked the margins of FA like a savant, but eventually the talent bleed caught up to them.
If we go back and look at the largest draft classes, they are also entirely uninspiring. Cleveland’s 2000 class for instance. There are a lot of variables at play of course, but only a single one of those players lasted more than 5 years in the league, and it was Dennis Northcutt, a fringe guy hanging on.
Oakland drafted 11 players in 2007, headlined by super bust Jamarcus Russell plus a 3rd round pick (Quentin Moses) they cut before his first training camp ended.
The Vikings made 15 picks (!) in 2020, and the best one was the guy they took in the 1st, Justin Jefferson, with their “free lottery ticket.” After that they hit on Metellus in round 6 and Blake Brandel is still around as a depth OL, but the other 12 guys are gone (one, DJ Wonnum, is with us).
Green Bay’s 13 player haul in 2023 is probably the best currently, but also still difficult to grade properly. Kraft looks like a hit and Jayden Reed has outperformed his draft slot, but Van Ness hasn’t been good and Musgrave can’t stay healthy. And for all that they were originally lauded for late picks like Colby Wooden, Wicks, Anthony Johnson, etc… none of them are with the team any more. Another downside of making more picks - there isn’t room for them all.
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Disagree entirely. Trading up does not = drafting more bad players. If you are bad at evaluating talent, you will miss on higher round players and lower round players at a higher rate than your contemporaries. If you consistently reduce your swings and you miss at the same rate as those that don’t, you will end up with a more woeful roster than the other guy. Because you both are going to miss. But you have CHOSEN to make YOUR misses MORE costly than those who don’t shed picks to miss.
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Someone needs to attempt to quantify the needs/BPA adherence spectrum for all of the various GMs 
That’s not what I said. My point was that “never trading up” = “drafting more bad players.” Because if you never trade up (using low picks to convert to high picks), you always have more low picks on your roster, and low picks are much more likely to be bad players than good players.
Using lower round picks to trade up means you end up drafting more high-value players at the expense of not drafting more low-value players… if you’re good at evaluating talent.
So really, optimal draft strategies depend first and foremost on your ability to evaluate talent. Trading up only works if you’re good at evaluating talent, and there’s a dearth of talent available. Trading down works… if you’re good at evaluating talent, and there’s a plethora of talent available. Staying pat works… if you’re good at evaluating talent, and the talent mirrors your draft positions. (This last scenario is the least likely to occur, btw.)
Now, if you’re bad at evaluating talent, then every draft pick is essentially a lottery ticket, in which case you should accumulate picks. So, if you see a GM consistently trading down for more picks, he’s probably bad at evaluating talent. Case in point: Kwesi. And even then, he’s still more likely to load up the team with more bad talent than good. This is why he’s no longer GM.
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I’ll give you one better than Kwesi, and it’s the same team.
Take a look at the 2020 Minnesota Vikings and Rick Spielman as GM. Through a ton of trades, they acquired fifteen players from the draft. I remember at the time, a ton of draftniks were declaring the Minnesota Vikings “won the draft” (which is always a kiss of death, as we know).
Here are the 15 picks.
| 1 | Justin Jefferson | 22 | WR | 6 | 2020 | 2025 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 65 | 94 | 5 | 8 | 91 | 0 | 0 | 15 | 38 | 1 | 579 | 8480 | 42 | LSU |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jeff Gladney | 31 | CB | 1 | 2020 | 2020 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 5 | 16 | 0 | 0 | 0 | TCU | ||||||||
| 2 | Ezra Cleveland | 58 | T | 6 | 2020 | 2025 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 33 | 93 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Boise St. | ||||||||
| 3 | Cameron Dantzler | 89 | CB | 4 | 2020 | 2023 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 10 | 37 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Mississippi St. | ||||||||
| 4 | D.J. Wonnum | 117 | DE | 6 | 2020 | 2025 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 26 | 86 | 0 | 0 | 0 | South Carolina | ||||||||
| 4 | James Lynch | 130 | DT | 5 | 2020 | 2025 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6 | 71 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Baylor | ||||||||
| 4 | Troy Dye | 132 | LB | 6 | 2020 | 2025 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 14 | 93 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Oregon | ||||||||
| 5 | Harrison Hand | 169 | CB | 3 | 2020 | 2022 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 27 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Temple | ||||||||
| 5 | K.J. Osborn | 176 | WR | 5 | 2020 | 2024 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 13 | 67 | 0 | 4 | 16 | 0 | 165 | 1902 | 16 | Miami (FL) | ||||
| 6 | Blake Brandel | 203 | T | 5 | 2021 | 2025 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 15 | 73 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Oregon St. | ||||||||
| 6 | Josh Metellus | 205 | S | 6 | 2020 | 2025 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 20 | 96 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Michigan | ||||||||
| 7 | Kenny Willekes | 225 | DE | 1 | 2021 | 2021 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Michigan St. | ||||||||
| 7 | Nate Stanley | 244 | QB | 0 | 0 | 0 | Iowa | ||||||||||||||||
| 7 | Brian Cole II | 249 | S | 0 | 0 | 0 | Mississippi St. | ||||||||||||||||
| 7 | Kyle Hinton |
Of the fifteen kicks at the can, the only player they landed worth a damn was Justin Jefferson at 22. A first round pick, which you expect to hit on. Then in 2021, they selected another 11 players and really only hit on Christian Darrisaw. These two drafts spelled the end for Rick Spielman, and then Kwesi came in 2022 and got fleeced in his first draft by trading Jamo to us for Lewis Cine.
In addition to the absolute garbage pick selection, the Vikings also ran into another more practical problem. With 15 draft picks, where exactly are all of those guys going to go on the roster? 15 guys is 28% percent of a roster. Now of course we know not every draft pick is going to make the roster, but even if half make the roster, that’s still 7 guys. Even for exceptionally bad teams, its rare to have 7 draft picks make your 53 man roster.
I believe trading down repeatedly for “more kicks at the can” is as stupid and short sighted as trading everything for one guy. I would put the Saints trading their whole draft for Ricky Williams as much an example of roster mismanagement as trading down a ton of times to draft a bunch of 4ths-7ths so you end up with 15 guys and end up cutting nearly all of them. Both are extreme ends of the spectrum, and both teams ended up in the same spot.
Here’s how I see it. If you trust your GM to make good draft picks, then he will find good players. If that means trading up and getting 5 guys, take it. If it means trading down and getting 9 guys, take it. A great GM is still going to miss on picks. They also have a better tendency to find talent in other places, but are just as likely to strike out. At the end of the day, the draft is entirely a lottery, and its a hindsight argument. Every guy who buys 99 lottery tickets can still lose 99 times, and the guy who buys 1 ticket hits a jackpot.
Using Holmes as our ultimate example, if Holmes says he sees something super special in TeSlaa and trades a bunch of picks for one guy, only history will tell if he is right or not. If Holmes decides to take a swing on a BroMart or Manu (both of which I understood, but hated), history will tell if he is right or not. I think Holmes actually got lost in his own sauce after the first two rounds in 2023, and basically felt every pick he made was going to be a winner, because he made it. That led him to get too loose and away from his OWN key metrics selecting a guy like Manu. Now for 2025 and especially 2026, I think we see Brad going back to his own roots and selecting guys he thinks are football players and not physical specimens.
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Martin Mayhew used to say the same thing that be drafts “BPA”. But then he picks Ebron who was more potential than actual BPA and he wanted his Jimmy Graham.
Its funny how the media treats BPA also. Let’s say someone drafts BPA they get bashed for not picking need.
Saying BPA helps GM’s not reveal what they’ll actually do. But it’s never BPA the way they say. It’s always BPA at position of need without reaching who is a Dan Campbell guy. They chose Miller over Freeling because Miller is the Dan Campbell guy. If they have a top 10 pick but there’s no DE graded in he top 10 and isn’t a DC guy they won’t draft him. There’s been times QB’s won’t get drafted until late in the 1st round.
Or they’ll pick someone who fills more of a lane. Like Gibbs. They think he could be generational. And he fills the lane of a speed back and pass catcher. Or Branch. CJGJ was on a 1 year deal. Branch could play S or NB and has the DC guy factor.
The 3rd possibility is like the Rams drafting Simpson. Stafford is year to year. They want someone for the future.
They’re not going to pick a MLB when they have Jack Campbell. They’re not going to pick a WR when they have plenty of them.
Also, GM’s are fans just like us. They have their draft crushes.
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