We’re going rogue in the SIS Football Research department, and we’re going to do something that our fearless leader Matt Manocherian would almost certainly not approve of: we’re going to analyze the NFL Draft from the perspective of team needs.

While we acknowledge that every team is always an injury away from having a brand new need, there must be some teams for whom need-based drafting would make more sense than others. Here’s our attempt at sorting that out:

Separating “Wants” from “Needs”

To evaluate each team’s roster, we used the Sonar Depth Chart that we publish on the SIS draft site and the 33rd Team site. For this visualization, each starter on the depth chart is evaluated relative to the rest of the league using their Total Points per game in their most recent season’s worth of games.

Using Sonar, we thought of teams as having “wants”—starters that are below the 50th percentile—and “needs”—positions that are below the 25th percentile. We then determined the extent of a team’s wants and needs by how far off each position was from no longer being a want. 

To identify teams with the most specific needs, for each team we compared the total extent of their needs to the total extent of their wants, simply by subtracting them. 

For example, a team that’s middle-of-the-road across the board with the exception of three players who are in the 20th percentile would have the highest possible rating, because all of their sub-par positions are positions of need. A team that’s full of 33rd percentile players would probably be rated as worse overall, but they wouldn’t have any specific needs. 

So, here is every team in the league ordered by this metric, with links to the team pages on the SIS draft site. A handful of teams are spelled out in more detail, but you can evaluate all of the rosters yourself by following each link.

And for reference, here is the color scale used to illustrate the quality of each starter:

1. Eagles

Just look at this depth chart and you know we’ve nailed the goal of identifying teams with specific needs. For a team coming off an excellent season they aren’t as well-positioned to take “luxury picks” as you might think, especially after losing multiple defensive starters to free agency. They have multiple first rounders, so they could have an opportunity to go for both a position of need and a best-player-available selection.

2. Seahawks

3. Chargers

The Chargers might need to look at a cornerback early on after struggling to solidify the opposite side of Asante Samuel Jr. with a struggling and injured J.C. Jackson. Adding a defensive tackle would fill one of their biggest needs too. Filling these major needs can make this one of the most complete rosters in the NFL.

4. Raiders

The Raiders have many more holes than the teams ahead of them on this list, but they are almost all strong needs. Their struggles primarily fall on the defensive side of the ball, with a back seven that Sonar makes look like the cast of the next Avatar movie. They finished the season 2nd to last in Pass Defense Total Points and allowed the highest EPA/play on passes. In addition to the backend, their linebacking corps can use improvement after losing Denzel Perryman to the Texans. Sitting at pick No. 7, they are in a good spot to address one of these defensive holes.

5. Titans

The Titans have major needs on the offensive side of the ball. After presumably losing Taylor Lewan to free agency, the Titans need to address their offensive line that already was in the bottom third in production a season ago in terms of Total Points. On top of that, another receiver would be welcomed after finishing in the bottom tier of Receiving Total Points. If the Titans end up taking a QB in the first round, it might be an unenviable position to be in for the young signal-caller.

6. Bengals

7. Vikings

8. Saints

9. Ravens

10. Jaguars

It might not look it based on the Sonar visual, but the Jaguars actually rated as the team with the smallest total value of their wants. There are opportunities for improvement on the offensive line and in the back seven defensively, but they’ve established solid starters on both sides of the ball. They won’t have as good of an opportunity to improve through the draft as they have in recent seasons because they were actually pretty good in 2022, but that’s a problem they’d accept.

11. Texans

12. Dolphins

13. Cardinals

And here we have the neediest team, but one with enough wants to go with them that they don’t top this list. The Cardinals could use the most help in their front seven after a couple of key departures, and their depth at receiver could look a lot better if Marquise Brown and Rondale Moore take steps forward in 2023 (or a lot worse if DeAndre Hopkins departs). Kyler Murray has his faults, but he’s not going to be replaced with the No. 3 pick in this year’s draft, so they have a great opportunity to start filling in these gaps.

14. Packers

15. 49ers

16. Jets

17. Broncos

18. Browns

19. Chiefs

20. Commanders

21. Bills

The Bills roster is balanced and strong. Wide receiver and linebacker are their biggest needs, but they could also stand to bolster the offensive tackle position as well. Sitting at pick No. 27, they certainly won’t have a first choice of who they want, so it would be wise to take the best player available.

22. Patriots

23. Steelers

24. Lions

25. Giants

26. Buccaneers

27. Colts

28. Falcons

29. Cowboys

30. Bears

31. Rams

How things have changed in the span of two years! The Rams look like a bare cupboard after several post-Super-Bowl departures, and one of the better positions listed on their Sonar is headed up by tight end Tyler Higbee, whose usage and hands performance in 2022 suggest he’ll be more valuable as a blocker than receiver going forward. They have the most wants in the league, but, because there are so many of them, their targets shouldn’t be as defined as the teams above them.

32. Panthers

The Panthers are a great example of what we’re trying to do here. They have zero needs by this measure, but have several wants (primarily on the offensive side of the ball). Establishing a franchise QB with the first pick in the draft will help, but there is definitely some work to be done across the skill positions with DJ Moore out of the picture. The Miles Sanders signing isn’t viewed too positively through the Total Points lens, but there’s no doubt they’re in a better spot at running back than they were without him.

Last year we dipped our toes into the conversation about draft pick value. Stephen Polacheck took two-year Total Points as the measure of performance and computed a curve that represents what you can expect from a selection throughout the draft.

This year we’ll take that work and extend it to two particular lines of inquiry: the potential value over a full contract, and the value teams are ascribing to future picks.

Production over a full rookie deal

Our previous iteration looked only at the Total Points accumulated in a player’s first two years. This is in line with how our scouting process works, as our grades project a player through his second NFL season. But there are enough players who jump up or fall off in the final years of their rookie deals that we wanted to look at a longer time horizon as well.

Here are the draft curves that we generate after each year in the first four. 

The biggest thing I notice when looking at these plots is that, in general, the differences between the curves are pretty consistent year-over-year. That basically means that we’re not seeing some kind of dramatic change in production of players in their third season, or something like that.

We can see a production advantage for early first round picks that persists throughout the player’s first contract. A player taken at the top of the first round essentially doubles the productivity of a player taken at the end of the first round at each step. That suggests top picks are overvalued by the rookie wage scale, which gives top draft picks roughly three times the contract value of a player selected at the end of the first.

You should notice the little hitch in the curve at around the end of the second round. That’s in part because these curves are actually made by blending a steeper first round curve with a more gradual full-draft curve, which results in a curve that doesn’t have a single smooth trajectory. But it’s also a kind of quirky peak of productivity over the past several years that is hard to fully smooth out. Just picks 62 to 64 from 2016 to 2021 have produced Carlton Davis, Kevin Byard, James Bradberry, Creed Humphrey, JuJu Smith-Schuster, and DK Metcalf.

Applying the value curve to previous trades

At this point we’re pretty familiar with the notion that the relatively flat curve of draft pick value past the top of the first round suggests that trading back is generally a pretty valuable proposition. 

For example, all of the seven pick-for-pick trades in the first round of the 2022 draft yielded more total expected production for the team moving down than the team moving up. How much value that is depends on which of the above curves you use, but the general trend is the same.

What I’ve found more interesting of late is the trading of future picks. Just in the first round of the 2021 draft, three pick-for-pick trades involved a future first round pick changing hands:

• The 49ers moving up 9 slots to take Trey Lance
• The Dolphins moving up 6 slots to take Jaylen Waddle
• The Bears moving up 9 slots to take Justin Fields

It’s tough to build a model that prescriptively assigns value to a future draft pick, because teams should place different value on future assets based on their franchise trajectory. But trades that have already been made can tell us something about how much temporal discounting teams are building in.

Let’s run these three trades through our model, comparing the projected four-year Total Points for the picks going each direction. We can assume that the difference between these values should be roughly the value teams are ascribing to the future picks included in those deals. 

Projected Four-Year Total Points of Picks Traded in 2021

	2021 pick value  given up	2021 pick value received	Suggested Value Rest of Trade
49ers -> Lance	88	119	31*
Dolphins -> Waddle	107	119	12
Bears -> Fields	83	101	19*

* Multiple future picks were traded

For a little bit of context, that “rest of trade” value can be compared to the value of a single pick in the current draft. The 31 projected Total Points that make up the remainder in the Lance deal—and therefore roughly what we think the future picks are worth—is comparable to the 87th pick in the current draft. The future picks in the Waddle deal compare to the 153rd pick in the current draft, and for Fields it’s the 121st pick.

So, if those trades were to be fair—which we actually shouldn’t expect them to be, because the team trading up is almost always going to pay a bit of a premium—the future picks would be valued at somewhere between a third rounder and a fifth rounder in total. Compared to a conventional-wisdom heuristic that a pick next year is worth one round less than a pick this year, we’re seeing some pretty heavy devaluing of future first round picks. 

We can also think of this through the lens of the implied discounting rate for a pick year-over-year. The Waddle example suggests that a future first round pick—which we can assume is the 16th pick in the next draft, for simplicity—is getting discounted by about 85% within one year (from 79 projected Total Points to 12). The Fields deal has a similar implied discounting rate.

Virtually all people employed by NFL teams are living in a world where you can’t guarantee your employment for very long, so it’s not unreasonable for teams to heavily devalue future draft picks. After all, even a draft pick this year might not bear fruit for two more seasons. But if teams are so willing to make trades to move up a few spots in the first round, it seems odd that they would value creating a first round pick from nothing, even if it’s deferred a year, would be more valuable than it seems to be.

Future Directions

With each year that we accumulate data, we also gather more firepower to build frameworks to evaluate the long-term value of players (and draft picks). Integrating draft pick value with long-term player projections will allow player-for-pick trades to be analyzed more usefully, and of course bringing in salary information (for player trades and for incoming rookies) informs teams’ decisions greatly.

Look for us to reference these draft pick values in evaluating trades during the upcoming draft season. Of course, keep in mind that these models are still a work in progress when it comes to measuring some of the “softer” factors that contribute to trade decisions. We still have some work to do to measure how much we should expect a team to overpay for the right to move up, and how much scarcity of available players at the position being acquired moves the needle.