Is it better to draft high or low in Round 1 in the NFL?

This year’s fifth-round option pickups defy recent thinking

People can argue till the cows come home about how good individual NFL players are. In the NFL, though, money talks. Regardless of what any GM says about how much he likes his draft picks, there is an objective way to assess whether a GM’s first round pick has been successful or not – the fifth-year option.

NFL rookie contracts are primarily of four years length, but for first-round picks, a GM has the option to extend the player’s rookie contract for a fifth year based on metrics set down in the Collective Bargaining Agreement, specifically playtime and Pro Bowl appearances. It’s a double-edged sword – on the one hand it’s a guarantee of a fairly sizable salary in Year 5 for the player, but on the other hand, the amount is usually well below what the best players would command in their fifth year.

Giants GM Joe Schoen had that difficult decision to make with Daniel Jones as soon as he started his job in 2022. In retrospect he chose poorly by declining the option, because Jones had the best year of his career that year and wound up signing a bigger contract than would have been the case had Schoen not picked up the option. Few thought his decision was bad at the time, though.

The wisdom among fans is that a good GM should hit on his first-round picks. That should be easier to do the higher you draft, i.e., the worse your team was the year before. That hasn’t been the case for the Giants, though. Here are their first-round picks from 2004-2014 (pick number indicated in the far right column):

Courtesy of StatMuse

It’s very impressive. There wasn’t a single pick who was an outright failure. There were a couple whose careers were derailed by injuries (Kenny Phillips, David Wilson) and a couple of others who were good but not great players (Aaron Ross, Prince Amukamara). The other six, though, were important contributors (including the guy they traded Philip Rivers for), and a few of them were elite. The most impressive thing is that in most of those years the Giants drafted in the lower half of the first round.

Since, then, though, it’s been a different story:

Courtesy of StatMuse

Some outright terrible picks (Ereck Flowers, Eli Apple, Deandre Baker, Kadarius Toney). Some who became significant contributors but were not good enough (Evan Engram, Daniel Jones, Deonte Banks so far). Really only Saquon Barkley, Dexter Lawrence, and Andrew Thomas can be considered elite, though Malik Nabers seems sure to reach that status if he finds a quarterback who can get him the ball. Kayvon Thibodeaux is somewhere in the middle, Evan Neal somewhere below the middle leaning toward terrible, and we’ll see about this year’s picks, Abdul Carter and Jaxson Dart. This checkered record has occurred despite the Giants drafting in the top 10 about half the time.

This raises the question: Where should a team want to draft? In one sense, the answer has to be No. 32 because it means you won the Super Bowl. From the standpoint of improving the team, though, fans would say No. 1 (judging by all the hand-wringing over the Giants’ meaningless late-season wins the past two seasons that denied them Jayden Daniels, Drake Maye, and now Cam Ward).

What do the numbers say about draft success as a function of draft position? There was an interesting paper published a little over a decade ago that defined “The Loser’s Curse” in the NFL. The basic idea was that the NFL salary scale for rookies decreases more quickly throughout the draft than does the quality of the players drafted. Thus, the league’s worst teams, drafting high, pay a premium for players whose excess skill isn’t all that much greater than those drafted later in the round. In a salary-capped NFL, this means that it’s harder to improve a bad team because the better teams get more bargains at the position at which they draft – hence the “loser’s curse.”

Here’s an illustration of the loser’s curse from Timo Riske of Pro Football Focus using their wins above replacement (WAR) metric, compared to their “salary win cost” (basically how much you pay per additional victory):

Courtesy of Pro Football Focus

You can see that WAR declines slowly over the first two rounds while cost declines sharply over the top 10 picks. Thus, surplus value (the green curve) peaks after the top 10, and it remains higher than the surplus value of the top 5 picks throughout the rest of the first round. That certainly jibes with the early 21st Century Giants playoff teams, who got tons of good to great players in the bottom half of the first round.

That’s not true for quarterbacks, though:

Courtesy of Pro Football Focus

If you’re drafting a quarterback, you’d like to get him as high in the draft as you can. That doesn’t mean that Jaxson Dart is doomed, it just means that for every Aaron Rodgers, Jordan Love, Lamar Jackson, Jalen Hurts, and Russell Wilson, there are more failures the later in the draft you go.

Which brings us in a roundabout way to the point of this article. May 1 has now passed, and NFL teams have had to make their decisions on the fifth year option for the 2022 class of draftees. The interesting things about 2022 were that there were no ballyhooed QBs in that draft, and the Giants had two top 10 picks. Based on the surplus value charts above, that means that it should have been a bad year to have one pick, much less two, in the top 10, because the peak surplus value for non-QBs was farther down in the first round. As we said at the beginning, though, picking up or declining the fifth-year option trumps any theory about player value. Here are the final decisions of the teams:

Courtesy of Over The Cap

The asterisks indicate the players whose option was picked up, i.e., the successful draft picks. (The No. 3 pick, Derek Stingley Jr., is missing because he signed a three-year, $90M contract extension, the highest ever for a cornerback. We’ll call that a successful pick.) You’ll see that of the 32 picks, only 18 had their options picked up. So much for the idea that a GM is supposed to get a great player with his first round pick. Joe Schoen batted .500: Although Thibodeaux is not yet a great player and may never become one, he’s a solid edge defender, hence he had his option picked up. Neal is bordering on bust, hence his option being declined, though he’ll get one more chance to see if he can succeed at guard.

More interesting is that all of the top 14 picks other than Neal had their options picked up, while only six of the remaining 18 picks did. That’s just the opposite of what the statistics over many years in the “Loser’s Curse” and Timo Riske articles showed. And frankly, even though six players in the bottom 18 did get the fifth year option, only a couple would be considered premier players.

There is a technicality here: Tyler Linderbaum has played well – his option was declined because of the $23M cost, due to the fact that the CBA classifies all offensive linemen together while in reality centers make much less than guards and tackles. The Ravens will surely sign him to a new contract. For the others in the bottom half of the round, it’s different. Players like Kenyon Green, Zion Johnson, Jahan Dotson, Trevor Penning, Treylon Burks, and Quay Walker have been outright disappointments, right in the middle of the round where surplus value for non-QBs is supposed to be the highest.

Is the 2022 class the start of a new trend or is it just an outlier? It was only a year before that the No. 2, 3, and 4 picks were Zach Wilson, Trey Lance, and Kyle Pitts. (Pitts’ option was actually picked up but most observers view him as falling short of his pre-draft promise.) Even the 2020 class that is remembered as having many great players at the top had 6 in the top 14 who did not have their fifth year option exercised (Chase Young, Jeff Okudah, Isaiah Simmons, C.J. Henderson, Mekhi Becton, Javon Kinlaw).

If the 2022 class is an indicator that GMs have better information and a better “process” to identify the very best players than they used to have, then it should be a coin toss at best as to whether a 25th pick like Jaxson Dart gets a second contract, much less a fifth year, with the Giants. The Giants have not done well in the latter stages of the first round in recent years (Baker, Toney, Banks). On the other hand, they have had some hits in the top 10 recently (Barkley, Thomas, Nabers), so perhaps Abdul Carter can join that circle. Unfortunately, if Joe Schoen hits on only one of his two 2025 two first-rounders, and it’s not the QB, making the right choice on Carter will be cold comfort to Giants fans. A loser’s curse of a different kind.