Under Sashi Brown, the Cleveland Browns seemed to value draft picks like fish value water. The team traded back as if their life depended on it, “bought” the draft pick that became Nick Chubb by taking on Brock Osweiler’s contract and generally chose the NFL draft over everything else.
While that didn’t work out for Brown in Cleveland, he is now the president of the Baltimore Ravens. Many of his moves also set the table for the competitive team that made the playoffs in 2020.
Some Browns fans worried that Andrew Berry, initially brought to the Browns by Brown, would follow in his footsteps but the team’s current general manager has been far more aggressive.
Speaking of aggressive, the Los Angeles Rams have taken that to a whole new level. We covered many of their moves in a previous podcast but it seems the Rams are leading the way towards the polar opposite of Sashi’s Browns:
you can see how the rams "f them picks" strategy changed the league by looking at the amount of teams that have 1st round picks per draft year:
-2015: 93.8%
-2016: 93.8%
-2017: 84.4%
-2018: 87.5%
-2019: 78.1%
-2020: 78.1%
-2021: 87.5%
-2022: 75.0%— Tej Seth (@tejfbanalytics) April 11, 2022
It is not surprising in a league that is becoming more analytics-driven that it would start to resemble the NBA more and more. Basketball has long been driven by competing teams selling the future for a chance to win now and non-competitive teams “tanking” for a chance at becoming competitive.
In the NFL, those kinds of trades were often limited to ones for quarterbacks. Big deals to acquire the most important position on the field made sense. Over the past few years, with the Rams leading the way, big deals have been made for cornerbacks, wide receivers, offensive linemen and defensive linemen.
With the 2022 NFL draft still a couple weeks away, an amazing amount of draft capital for the 2023 draft has already been traded. Five first-round picks and four day-two picks are already owned by new teams for a draft that is over a year away.
In all, 29 picks in 2023 have already changed hands as have another seven (three involved in the Deshaun Watson trade) in the 2024 draft.
For Los Angeles, trades for Matthew Stafford, Jalen Ramsey, Von Miller and the rest turned into a Super Bowl victory. In a copycat league, and one leaning hard into analytics, expect that to continue with more and more teams mortgaging the future if they think they have a chance now. In turn, more teams may turn to the Sashi Brown model during their teardown.