The Rams Draft Pick Will Have to Get Off to a Cam Newton or Peyton Manning Type Impact to Break Even on the Trade

The Rams made the blockbuster trade for the first overall pick. Despite Jeff Fisher’s trolling, it has to be a quarterback. The Rams gave up 6 picks, including two first rounders (and all picks are in the first three rounds) to get the first overall, plus two later picks.

I thought it might be informative to show how much the Rams spent, by how good the player they draft has to be in order to break even.

As summarized here by Will Brinson, using Chase Stuart’s draft value chart numbers, the Rams gave up 69.8 points of value, compared to getting 40.7. But those numbers likely mean nothing to you without any context, so I’ll try to explain how they were derived. The underlying basis is approximate value, which tries to assign an approximate number to each player’s season, by dividing up the pie for that player’s unit (offense or defense). The pie is larger for great offenses, and small for bad ones. The quarterback gets a larger share than other positions. Pro bowlers and all-pros get a larger share. For positions that have them, players with better stats get a bigger share (so an offense with a 1,500 yard receiver and 500 yard receiver isn’t going to assign them equally).

Chase’s chart then looks at the first five years, and subtracts out 2 points of value (because we are looking at marginal value, over a non-draft pick). So that 69.8 number represents the marginal approximate value of all the Titans’ new picks, for the first five years. Some will bust, some will break out, but it’s looking at actual history to see how picks in those same spots turned out.

So let’s turn to the Rams’ side. The two later picks have only a combined marginal value of 6.1. So in order to break even, the first overall pick would have to add 63.7 of value in the first five years to break even. Here’s a summary of the largest “approximate value” during the first five years, for all quarterbacks drafted Top 5 in the NFL draft since the merger. There are 49 total who went straight out of college to NFL (I’m excluding USFL guys like Kelly and Young).

Only two–Cam Newton and Peyton Manning–exceeded that 63.7 mark. Several others had good starts. You could view it as the quarterback position is very valuable (it is) and thus having a franchise guy gives you more value than other positions because you can lock them up long term. That’s an argument in favor, but even if you add in the guys that didn’t get to 63 in value in the first five years, but were franchise elite talents for the next 5, you still are at about 20% of all top 5 picks at the quarterback position working out to justify this trade cost.