NFL Draft trades: What recent trends tell us about first-round deals

Here we are, just hours before the start of the 2025 NFL Draft and, amazingly, all 32 teams still have their original first-round pick. Normally, at least one team would have already borrowed from future assets and given up a first-rounder either to move up in a previous draft, or to acquire a veteran player.

In fact, during the Common Draft Era, this is the closest to a draft where no first-round picks have been traded. And while it looks like we’ll start Thursday night with all 32 teams keeping their picks, it would be even more rare if it stayed that way. The league has averaged 5.6 trades involving first-round picks during the draft per year since 2020, and an examination of those deals yields some surprising observations.

It’s not just quarterbacks

What position are NFL teams most likely to use a pick on after trading up in the first round? Surprise, it’s not quarterback. There have been just four of those types of trades in the past five years, and only one in the past three drafts. And it’s not edge rusher either, as there have been only three of those.

The answer is receiver. There have been eight such trades in the past five years, double that of any other position. We’ve seen the market value of elite receivers explode in recent years, so the chance to get a top pass-catcher on the cheap with a rookie contract is something teams will actively overpay to acquire in the draft. Of the eight receivers, it’s worth noting that none has made a single Pro Bowl, though you’d consider Jaylen Waddle, DeVonta Smith and Brandon Aiyuk as solid picks, just the same.

The 28 players taken after teams traded up or into the first round of the draft break down like this: eight receivers, four quarterbacks, four cornerbacks, three edges, three offensive tackles, two defensive tackles, two linebackers, one guard and one tight end. That’s 17 on offense, 11 on defense, a predictable tilt given the positional values across the league for first-round picks.

Good teams are aggressive first-round traders

Seven NFL teams have traded up more than once in the past five drafts, and those seven include the top four seeds in last year’s playoffs: the Chiefs, Bills, Eagles and Lions. The other three include the Vikings, who went 14-3 last year as a wild card, and the Jets and 49ers, who fell well short of the playoffs. So arguably five of the best teams in last year’s NFL standings were teams that have been active in moving up high in the draft.

We’re not saying there’s a direct link between trading up in the first round and team success — good teams pick later in the first round, when it costs less to move up and teams with loaded returning rosters have more leeway to consolidate picks and take a risk. Those moves don’t all work out, but you can point to the Eagles trading up for Jalen Carter in 2023 and Jordan Davis in 2022 as a central part of the defensive line that sparked their Super Bowl victory.

More than half the league — 19 teams out of 32 — has traded up at least once in the past five drafts, and almost as many (18) have traded down in the same time span. The teams that have traded down the most include the Jaguars and Patriots, both still picking in the top five this year, but it also makes sense that a team stockpiling lower-round picks might not yet see the full return on that investment.

Picks can bounce around quite a bit

If you want to appreciate how much a pick can change hands, consider the No. 12 pick in the 2021 draft.

The 49ers had it to begin with, and traded it as part of a massive package they sent to the Dolphins to get quarterback Trey Lance with the No. 3 pick. The Dolphins then traded it to the Eagles so they could take receiver Jaylen Waddle at No. 6 — certainly a better pick than Lance. Philadelphia traded the No. 12 pick to Dallas to move up to No. 10 and take receiver DeVonta Smith, another solid pick. The Cowboys, as the fourth owner of the No. 12 pick, used it on Micah Parsons, a four-time Pro Bowler and in line to soon become the highest-paid non-quarterback in league history.

San Francisco obviously made a terrible gamble on Lance, the kind a front office only survives by also finding a star quarterback in Brock Purdy with the final pick of the seventh round. “Thank God for Mr. Irrelevant,” 49ers GM John Lynch said last year. Miami, as the beneficiary of that Lance deal, used other picks in packages to get receiver Tyreek Hill and edge rusher Bradley Chubb, and Philadelphia used the pick it got from Miami to help get Davis. So the team that took the biggest gamble took the biggest loss, and the most patient team of the four, the Cowboys, somehow got the best player.

Trading up doesn’t always land stars

NFL teams have traded up to take players in the first round 28 times in the past five years. How many of those 28 players would you guess have made a Pro Bowl? We’re including this sentence just as a buffer, so you can formulate a guess without seeing the answer right away.

The answer is just four. That’s less than a 15 percent success rate, and three of the four are defensive linemen: Houston’s Will Anderson, Philadelphia’s Carter and the Jets’ Jermaine Johnson. The only player taken after trading up who has made more than one Pro Bowl is Bucs tackle Tristan Wirfs. He’s been to four, or more than the other 27 such players combined.

Trading up is perhaps the best sign of a team’s conviction and belief in a player’s value, but that doesn’t shield the team from being wrong.

First-round trades rarely mean moving that far up or down

The closer a team is to the one on the clock, the less it has to give up to acquire a pick, so first-round trades are often minor, low-cost shifts to move up a spot or two. Nine of 28 in the past five years have had a team moving up one or two spots. As such, the cost of moving up is often minor: Only five times in the past five years has a team moving up given up a pick higher than a third-rounder to do so.

Those five, just for reference, are the Texans jumping up from 12 to 3 for Anderson in 2023, the Lions moving way up from 32 to 12 for receiver Jameson Williams in 2022, the 49ers and Dolphins trades for Lance and Waddle in 2021, and the Bears giving up a future first for Justin Fields that same year. We should also mention the Titans giving up receiver A.J. Brown for the Eagles’ first-round pick in 2022 as a significant investment outside of draft assets.

Only two first-round trades in the past five years have seen teams move up more than nine spots: the Lions for Williams in 2022, and the Chargers moving up from 37 to 23 for linebacker Kenneth Murray in 2020. Again, moving up 10 spots at the end of the first round means substantially less than doing so in the top half of the first. And rather strangely, the most common distance between the team trading up and the team trading down is nine spots — six such deals in five years.

The pick a team gets in trading down is another shot at a mid-round gem, but it also can turn to nothing quickly. When the Packers moved up four spots to get Jordan Love in 2020, they sent the Dolphins a fourth-round pick to do so, and Miami, even after moving up in the fourth round, used that pick on guard Solomon Kindley, who was out of the league entirely in just two years.

Teams trading down can still get their guy

Teams trading down usually do so because they have multiple players on their board they’d be happy to get, so they’ll give up getting the best of those to add lower picks for improved depth. There’s a calculated risk in going from a player you know you could have to one you might be able to get later, but it’s worked out almost as well as trading up.

In terms of players making multiple Pro Bowls, there are more of those from teams that traded down than those trading up. The LIons moved down from 6 to 12 in 2023 and still got running back Jahmyr Gibbs. The Ravens slid down two spots in 2022 and still got center Tyler Linderbaum, and the Cowboys got Parsons after trading down two spots to 12 in 2021. One of last year’s best rookies, receiver Brian Thomas Jr., went to the Jaguars at 23 after they dropped six picks and added two picks in this year’s draft.

There have been at least four trades during the first round in each of the past nine drafts, so though it’s been silent so far this year, don’t expect the same on Thursday night.

Greg Auman is an NFL Reporter for FOX Sports. He previously spent a decade covering the Buccaneers for the Tampa Bay Times and The Athletic. You can follow him on Twitter at @gregauman.

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