If you’re an NFL general manager with your heart set on a top 10 prospect at the draft but only a top 20 pick, you’ve got two options. You can hope your guy slides down draft boards and makes you an easy — and lucky — winner in Mel Kiper’s eyes, or you can bundle up some draft assets and start calling your fellow GMs with trade offers.
We’ll see plenty of the latter on Thursday night. Draft night deals have become the expectation in a league where aggression trumps passivity in most situations. While there were only three in the first round of last year’s event, teams followed that up with a dozen more in rounds two and three. 2022 may fall more in line with last year’s Day 1 than Day 2 thanks to a limited lineup of franchise-changing quarterbacks and deep crops of cornerback, offensive line, and pass rushing help. But if a pick gets traded Thursday night, we’ll have it tracked and evaluated here.
We’ll also dig into how each trade shakes out per a modified version of the chart Bill Belichick uses to assess pick value in these swaps. Like Jimmy Johnson’s before it, it assigns a number of points to each pick, creating a scale by which two second round picks can fairly be measured against a late first round selection. His system, adapted by Rich Hill of the always wonderful Pats Pulpit, will be used to analyze the raw value of the deal before moving parts like actual player selections gum up the works.
Here are the deals that went down in the first round of the 2022 NFL Draft, what Belichick’s guide says about them, and how we think each team did.