The Draft Value Chart Doesn’t Lie: Dallas Shouldn’t Trade Pick 25

After I released my last article, “2 Early Cowboys Mock Drafts: You Vote“, one thing immediately jumped out to me, not from the mock drafts themselves, but from the comments.

A few fans kept repeating the same idea:

Trade the second first-round pick, move out of 25 and pick up a 2nd and 3rd.

It didn’t matter whether they liked the players I mocked at 14 or 25. It didn’t matter how the board fell. The loudest reaction was that Dallas should automatically turn pick 25 into more draft capital.

When I pulled up the draft value chart, the numbers told a very different story. And honestly, I don’t know if fans, because I didn’t either, realize how far off the math really is.

The Draft Value Chart Changes the Conversation

Here are the Cowboys’ actual values from the draft value chart:

Pick 14 – 1100 points
Pick 25 – 720 points
Pick 114 – 66 points
Pick 154 – 29.8 points
Pick 178 – 19.8 points
Pick 179 – 19.4 points
Pick 221 – 2.3 points
Pick 233 – 1.0 points

Total draft capital: 1958.3 points

Most of the fan debate centered specifically on pick 25, the 720-point draft asset that everyone seems to want to move. Once you compare that value to what fans think Dallas can get in return, the argument falls apart quickly.

Fans Asked For a Trade, and It Doesn’t Add Up

On the value chart, the first picks of the 2nd and 3rd rounds look like this:

First pick of Round 2–580 points
First pick of Round 3–265 points

Add them up and we get 845 points. On paper, that would be a massive win for the Cowboys if they could trick the Tennessee Titans into taking this trade.

Here’s the part that is overlooked: no NFL team is giving up the top of the 2nd and the top of the 3rd for the 25th overall pick. Ever.

Those types of trades only happen when someone is moving into the top half of the draft, usually to grab a quarterback. Pick 25 doesn’t command that type of premium.