It's Friday night and the kids are asleep and I have some time to waste. A few times now, I've seen people mention that worst case scenario, we bought a comp pick for $1.3M. It made me wonder whether that was a good deal or not.
Obviously it matters who we pick. If it's a bust, it's nothing, if it's a HOFer, it's well worth it. But strictly using averages, we can see if it's even good practice to do so.
Let's say that it's a 3rd-round comp pick, but not one of the top ones. Let's say it is pick 100, what is that worth?
Well we could start by looking at what the 100th pick of the draft gets paid. That's just under $3M for 4 years, with less than $620K guaranteed. So roughly $750K per year for a rookie 100th overall pick. If you factor in BB spending $1.3M to get it, that puts the total just over $1M per year.
Using Chase Stuart's draft value chart which uses career AV over 2 per season, the 100th pick is worth 5.3 points above average. The average NFL career is 3.2 to 3.5 years (let's go with 3.5) and generates AV of 2 so that's 7, so the 100th pick should generate 12.3 career AV over 3.5 years, or an average of 3.5 AV per season.
It's hard to accurately gauge the potential value of this because pretty much everyone with a 3 or 4-year career and a career AV of 11 or 12 did so under a rookie contract. But if we use the 3.5 AV average and project it out past rookie contracts to see what those paid vs. a rookie doing similar. For example, a player who played 7 years and produced 23 career AV would potentially tell us what those last 3 years are worth for that type of production.
There aren't a ton of exact comparables, but the ones we see show that the cost would easily be absorbed by having a rookie vs. a vet. Oddly enough, there are a lot of Ravens on this list. I guess because they have a bunch of mediocre draft picks who were just good enough to get second deals, but bad enough to do little else.
Ed ****son was drafted in the 3rd round (70th overall) and generated 10 AV over his first few years. This got him a 3-year, $6M deal with Carolina. He has probably failed to live up to that, but that's the type of contract one can expect.
His teammate and fellow TE with Baltimore, Dennis Pitta, was drafted 114th overall. He also had a 10 career AV. He signed a $2M tender after his rookie contract, then signed a 5-year, $32M contract after that.
Shareece Wright was not drafted by the Ravens, but is now one. He also had 10 career AV after his rookie contract as the 89th pick overall. That led to a 1-year, $2.95M deal with the 49ers. He would be released mid-season and signed cheaply by Baltimore, but they re-signed him this off-season for 3 years, $13M.
Jah Reid is another former Raven (85th overall) with a career AV of 6. He signed a minimum deal but got cut by the Ravens, at which point the Chiefs swooped in and gave him 3 years, $10.2M.
So similar types of players who are not on rookie contracts look to be getting $2M to $4M a season if you don't count Pitta's ridiculously stupid deal. Even with spending the extra $1.3M, that puts the average rookie season at under $1.1M per year x 4 seasons, which puts the 4-year savings around $3.6M to $11.6M.
So yes, that comp pick is potentially quite valuable, and if we could always buy one in the 3rd round for that price, we should.
