What NFL draft picks actually became — expected career value by slot, estimated from 3,339 traded picks (1967–2019) and Pro Football Reference career data.
The chance a pick becomes a Pro Bowler — or never amounts to anything — by draft slot.
Mean career AV with 95% confidence intervals. Round 1 is a different sport.
We took 3,339 traded draft picks (1967–2019), looked up what each player actually became via Pro Football Reference career Approximate Value, and fit a curve by draft slot — separately for three eras, since free agency and the rookie wage scale repriced picks over time. Busts count as zero. Toggle the Jimmy Johnson overlay to see the gap between what teams paid and what picks became.
Pro Football Reference's career Approximate Value (wAV) is a single-number estimate of a player's career production, weighted toward peak seasons. It's imperfect — it discounts quarterbacks relative to their market price and treats line play coarsely — but it's the best public single metric spanning 1967 to today.
A 1975 3rd-rounder and a 2015 3rd-rounder aren't the same asset. Free agency (1993), the salary cap (1994), and the rookie wage scale (2011) each repriced draft picks — the wage scale especially made early picks cheaper and more valuable. One pooled curve would smear those differences away.
This site's archive covers picks that changed hands — about a quarter of all drafted players. Slot coverage is uniform across the draft order, so the sample isn't badly biased, but strictly the curve reflects traded-pick value. A full-draft validation is on the roadmap.
Not directly. This chart measures outcome value — what picks became. Teams pay for expected value under uncertainty, plus positional scarcity. Use it to inform trades, not settle them.
Their careers are still in progress. Including them would bias the curve downward in ways correlated with draft slot — early picks from 2022 have had more time to accumulate value than late picks from 2024.