FALL 2024

AUTHOR

Blake Zilberman, University of Pennsylvania
Ryan S. Brill, University of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

Football analysts traditionally value a future draft pick position by its expected performance or surplus value. But, these expected value curves do not match the valuation implied by the observed trade market. One takeaway is general managers are making terrible trades on average. An alternative explanation is they are using some other value function that captures an essential piece of the puzzle missing from previous analyses.

We are partial to the latter explanation. In particular, traditional analyses don’t consider how variance in performance outcomes changes over the draft. Because variance decays convexly across the draft, eliteness (e.g., right tail probability) decays much more steeply than expected value. We suspect general managers value performance nonlinearly, placing exponentially higher value on players as their eliteness increases. This is because elite players have an outsize influence on winning the Super Bowl.

Thus, in this paper we consider nonlinear draft value curves that capture the outsize influence of elite players. Such nonlinear value functions produce steeper draft value curves that more closely resemble the observed trade market.