NFL draft 2021 data: What will Eagles do with No. 12 pick after trade with Dolphins?

Updated April 22, 2021, 10:02 a.m. ET

Published April 22, 2021, 9:17 a.m. ET

First in a two-part series | Part 2 | Addendum

When the Eagles had the No. 6 pick in next week’s NFL draft, they were considered to be on the periphery of contention for one of the top five quarterbacks in this year’s class — Trevor Lawrence, Justin Fields, Mac Jones, Trey Lance, and Zach Wilson.

They had options: trade up (likely to pick a new franchise quarterback), sit tight, or trade back.

They opted to trade back, swapping No. 6 and 156 for the Miami Dolphins’ No. 12, 123, and a first-round pick next year.

That trade was part of what was essentially a three-team deal, coming almost immediately on the heels of the Dolphins acquiring that 12th pick in a trade with the San Francisco 49ers. The Niners got the third overall pick from the Dolphins, who also received two future first-round picks and a future third-rounder from San Francisco.

Based on data from the last 27 drafts, Eagles general manager Howie Roseman got a good return in draft capital on his end of the trades. But will that capital materialize into on-field performance? Roseman’s record in that regard is a little spotty.

To evaluate the decisions teams make with draft picks, The Inquirer gathered player performance data and paired it with every NFL draft since 1994 (when the draft shrunk to its current seven rounds) to create a tool that assigns value to each spot in the draft based on actual player performance. The data also lets us compare players’ on-field value to an expected value based on where they were drafted.

Here’s how it works:

We collected the players picked since 1994 — all 6,809 of them — and their corresponding approximate value (AV), a metric formulated by Pro Football Reference that assigns each player a cumulative value, allowing us to compare players across positions and seasons.
We took the AV for the players in each draft class and sorted them — the top AV in the class of 2020 is Chase Young at 14, in 2019 it’s Kyler Murray’s 31, in 2018 it’s Lamar Jackson’s 50, etc.
We added up the top-rated player each year, the second-rated player each year, the third-rated player each year, and so on, to get a total for each rank. We divided each number by the top-ranked total and multiplied it by 100 to get a number for each spot, which we’re calling draft capital.

Here’s an example. The players with the third-most AV in each class since 1994 totaled 2,874 points. When you divide that number by the total for players with the top AV in each class (3,969) you get 0.7241. Multiply that by 100, and you come up with the No. 3 pick having a draft capital of 72.41. (Because in theory, teams are trying to pick the best player available, this is sorted based on players’ actual AV; the top spot is worth a full 100.)

Based on this scale, the Eagles and Dolphins each got a good return on the series of trades last month. The Eagles gained 35.57 points of capital over the next two drafts. That’s the equivalent of about the 26th overall pick. The Dolphins gained 40.14 points over the next three drafts, or about the capital of a No. 20 overall selection. (To calculate the capital of future picks, we used the median of the values from whatever round the selection will fall in.)

All of that extra capital the Eagles and Dolphins squeezed out of those trades came from the 49ers, who lost the equivalent of a No. 2 or No. 3 overall pick.

It’s not uncommon for teams moving back to get the better end of the deal. Especially for a data-driven organization like the Eagles, there’s a growing philosophy that moving back to stockpile picks can help improve a team’s odds of landing productive players.

“It’s a high-variance activity, as far as selecting players,” NFL Network analyst Ben Fennell said. “More people just want more darts to throw at the board because it’s an unpredictable activity. But if you feel good about the people making your evaluations and making your selections and there is a unique scenario of a position in need and a player you guys highly covet, then yeah, go get him.”

Teams have had charts to help them evaluate draft-pick trades for decades. The first known one was developed by Jimmy Johnson, when he coached the Dallas Cowboys, and became widely used around the league. Johnson’s chart, developed about 30 years ago, follows a similar path as ours. Where it differs is between about picks No. 5 and No. 170. Johnson’s chart does not value those picks as much as ours does.

No matter the details of the chart, it’s clear the Niners made a trade that significantly hurt their draft capital, begging the question, “Why?” Because even though teams have value charts, many think the possibility of getting a franchise quarterback can be worth ignoring what those charts tell them. There is a strong belief the Niners moved up to pick Alabama’s Jones, although they’ve also done their due diligence on Fields and Lance.

“If you don’t have a franchise quarterback, you better go up and get one,” Fennell said. “They don’t grow on trees, it’s a really hard thing to find.”

It’s a situation the Eagles know well. A week before the 2016 draft, they made a deal with the Browns to move up six spots so they could get Carson Wentz.

Theory vs. practice

All of the draft capital charts in the world can’t help teams pick the right players, though. So while no GM thinks they’ll get a better player at No. 12 than at No. 6 — despite post-draft sound bites claiming we had him much higher on our board — actual draft practice is something different.

Look at the AV from each spot in the draft compared to how it should have turned out.

Expectations and reality are clearly two different things. Whatever the key factors — a team’s prospect-evaluation skills; luck; or a last-minute, viral gas-mask video — the curve of actual value from players is much flatter than what is expected.

What does this mean for the Eagles? The data since Roseman’s return to the top decision-making role in the team’s football operations shows the Eagles have been in the bottom half of the league in draft performance.

Since the 2016 draft, Roseman’s first after Chip Kelly was fired, the Eagles rank in the bottom half of the NFL in picks made, the total AV they should have expected from their picks, actual AV returned from the players chosen, and the rate of return between AV and expected AV.

Roseman’s performance with the picks he’s used since 2016 has not been bad — he’s gotten 97.3% of the expected value from the selections he’s made, 18th in the league — but the team still ranks 28th in total AV from its selections.

Part of that is the price of the Eagles’ relative on-field success. The Birds were 45-35 with three playoff appearances and a Super Bowl title in the seasons preceding those drafts, meaning they usually picked in the back half of each round. But another reason is that they ranked 22nd in the number of players selected, whether through a lack of compensatory picks or by trading some of their selections away. With fewer darts to throw at the board, it’s less likely they’d hit a bull’s-eye.

Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie has acknowledged the front office’s decision to trade draft capital with the hope to win another championship has hurt the team’s long-term outlook.

“I think we gained from the short-term decision-making, but there was no stage where we weren’t aware that a lot of those decisions and resource allocations and the lack of volume of draft picks wasn’t eventually going to create a real trough,” Lurie said on Jan. 11. “We’re in a real transition period, and it’s not unlike 2016.”

Still, the Eagles haven’t been widely successful with the picks they’ve made in the last several offseasons, with the most noticeable misses including taking JJ Arcega-Whiteside over Seattle Seahawks star receiver DK Metcalf and taking Jalen Reagor over Vikings receiver Justin Jefferson. Left tackle Andre Dillard, the team’s first-round pick in 2019, has had a rocky start to his career, struggling in his rookie season and missing his sophomore year with a biceps injury suffered in training camp.

“I sit there and I get to see exactly what took place and takes place,” Lurie said. “Maybe someday I’ll write a book about it, but you can’t really talk publicly about what could have been and all that. There are mistakes made and they have to be improved, corrected, and I expect us to have that success. We’ve certainly had the success on the field that has to be in every aspect of the organization.”

But, at least for now, it looks like the Eagles are changing their approach. Along with having the “luck” of their original picks coming sixth in each round due to their 4-11-1 record last season, they have 11 selections this year, tied for most, and rank eighth in total draft capital, based on our chart.

Next year, the Eagles have nine picks: all of their own, plus the Dolphins’ first-round selection and either a first- or second-round pick from the Colts. If they hold onto all of those picks, they’ll have 20 selections over the next two drafts, the same amount they had in the last three.

6th ➡️ 12th

When the Eagles traded back last month with Miami, they gained in total draft capital thanks to getting an extra first-round pick in 2021. For this year, however, they lost 17.8% of the capital of their first-round selection by going from sixth to 12th.

But, again, theory and practice are not the same. There are peaks and valleys in the actual value returned at each spot in the draft — just look back at the performance vs. expectations chart above. Over the last 27 drafts, there hasn’t been much difference, in total, between the players taken at Nos. 6 and 12. The total AV is separated by just 17 points and the AV per game played is less than 0.01 of a point.

As for what the data tells us about the Eagles’ chances of getting good return at No. 12, since Roseman’s return to power they’ve been in the lower half of the league in terms of first-round performance. He’s done well finding players in the later rounds, however.

When asked about his draft record at the start of the offseason, Roseman conceded there have been a fair share of misses in recent years.

“Well, we are a 4-11-1 roster, so I mean, you are what your record says you are,” he said on Jan. 4. “The three years before, we had won 35 games. We have a lot of players who are on this team, some of them older, that are drafted by our organization, drafted by the people in this building that are going to end up going to the Eagles Hall of Fame. That doesn’t mean we haven’t missed on some picks.

“I would just say if there’s a guy that’s playing really well that we were looking at in the draft or decide to go in a different direction, those things hurt. Those things are punches to your gut.”

Roseman’s draft history is one of the reasons the Eagles are 22-25-1 over the last three seasons. But the GM’s overall performance, including in the draft, is also why there’s a Lombardi Trophy in the NovaCare Complex.