How Football Trade Trees ranks trades, values draft picks, and scores player fame.
Team pages list the five biggest deals in franchise history. "Biggest" means the trades that matter most to fans — the ones people remember and talk about.
The ranking starts with the players involved. Trades featuring well-known players rank above trades involving only draft picks or lesser-known players. When two trades feature players of similar stature, the one that moved more draft capital ranks higher.
Only players directly part of the deal count toward its ranking. A player who appears elsewhere in the same trade tree but wasn't in that specific trade adds nothing to it.
A 0–100 score measuring a player's on-field career significance. It combines career production (Pro Football Reference's Approximate Value) with career honors — All-Pro selections, Pro Bowls, MVP awards, Hall of Fame induction — with the biggest honors weighted most heavily. Jerry Rice is the maximum at 100.0.
Players from before 1980 and undrafted players are scored from professional accolades, with the same honor weights applied consistently across eras. AFL honors from the 1960s count as NFL equivalents. College honors are excluded; only professional accomplishments count.
A 0–100 score measuring how well-known a player is right now — distinct from career value. It answers "how big a name is this?" rather than "how good was he?" This is the primary input to trade star power.
It's computed from Wikipedia readership: how many people are looking up a player, measured over the prior 12 months, combined with how widely they're recognized (the number of languages with an article about them). Sustained, broad interest scores higher than a single viral week.
The contrast it captures:
| Player | Views/month | Languages | Cultural fame |
|---|---|---|---|
| Herschel Walker | ~94,000 | 11 | 42.6 |
| Steve Wisniewski | ~2,000 | 4 | 24.5 |
Walker was a cultural phenomenon; Wisniewski was an excellent guard. Career-value stats treat them as comparable; cultural fame doesn't. That's the point.
Draft picks are valued with the Jimmy Johnson draft value chart — the standard point system NFL front offices have used since the early 1990s. The #1 overall pick is worth 3,000 points, declining down through all seven rounds.
Because trades often involve picks whose exact slot isn't known yet (future picks), the site values them ex ante — as teams saw them on trade day:
Draft points serve two roles: they're the tiebreaker in trade bigness, and they determine the ex-ante value of future picks. The Blockbusters leaderboard ranks trades by the same bigness formula described above.
The trade archive is updated continuously as new deals are reported. Fame scores are refreshed periodically — career fame when new season data is available, cultural fame as public attention shifts. Scores reflect the most recent update, not a fixed snapshot.
Trades with well-known players rank above trades without them. Among trades featuring similar-caliber players, the one that moved more draft capital ranks higher.
Because at the time of the trade, it was just a pick. The ranking reflects what the trade was when it happened, not what it turned into years later.
Cultural fame measures how much public attention a player is getting right now, which favors active players and recent storylines. Career fame is the counterweight — it doesn't move with the news cycle.