This goes up Thursday, only a few hours before the start of the 2026 NFL Draft. That’s 257 picks spread across 32 teams, in an order that was set more or less the day last season ended. Except not really, because teams keep moving those picks here and there like they’re Pokemon cards or POGs or whatever collector’s item was hot when you were a kid. Already, 85 of the 257 picks have changed hands at least once, including four (6.182, 6.198 and 6.211) that have made five stops already. Trades are obviously a huge part of the NFL Draft. And as much as draft picks are like lottery tickets, trades for draft picks are that times 10. So today, before we see how teams have fared in their draft pick trades. I went back through the last 10 years of drafts and examined every single trade that involved a draft pick (this, uh, took a while). I scored every trade using Pro Football Reference’s Approximate Value metric, which — even PFR will admit this — is not an exact or comprehensive science. Any one score should be taken with several enormous grains of salt. But over a large scale, in the aggregate, it gets fairly informative. There are plenty of technical things here about how the picks and trades are classified and categorized, but rather than bogging down this already-riveting introduction with all of it right here, I’ll put some process notes at the bottom. The main takeaway, though, is that as long as everything is consistent it should be fine. Still, check the bottom if you’re curious on the ins and outs. So which teams have done the best in the trade market over the last decade? Which have decided to not really bother with the trades? And who had the best or worst single years? Let’s take a look. (Keep in mind that the more recent the trade and draft year, the less time for an impact. Scores in 2024 and 2025 are generally going to be lower than trades in 2016 and 2017.)

These are the top 16 in number of draft pick trades made across the last decade:

Basically, the Patriots are always open for business. The gap between the Patriots at first and the Eagles at second is the same as the gap between the Eagles at second and the Dolphins/Vikings at 10th. The Patriots have a recent history of underwhelming first-rounders (at least until Christian Gonzalez/Drake Maye in 2023-2024), but the trades have come up and down the draft. For example, in 2018, the Patriots had at least temporary possession of five different fourth-round picks (4.105, 4.114, 4.117, 4.131, 4.136). The number of picks they made in that round: Zero. They traded for a second for the Bears’ fourth and second, then dealt that fourth to Cleveland for a different fourth. Then they traded that fourth to the Lions for a future third. They traded for the Lions’ fourth-rounder, then sent it to the Buccaneers in a different trade. They originally owned 4.131 and 4.136 but dealt them both, one to the Eagles and the other to the Rams. In other words, if you think the Patriots are about to make a pick … no they aren’t.

There are the bottom 16 in number of draft pick trades made across the last decade:

As much as the Patriots have dominated draft pick trades over the last 10 years, that’s how much the Chargers have not done so. They made 1 or 0 trades involving draft picks every year from 2016 to 2023 before surging (you know, relatively) to 2 and 4 trades in 2024 and 2025, respectively. There were 20 examples in the last decade of a team making at least 10 trades involving draft picks in a single year (including four for the Patriots), while the Chargers only managed 10 in the decade total. Your favorite team can probably forget Joe Hortiz’s number today. It’s a lost cause.

By PFR’s AV (again, grain of salt, but it’s going to get us a lot of the way there directionally), 15 teams have managed a cumulative positive return on their draft trade activity over the last decade:

The Seahawks were steady, with positive scores in nine of 10 years, including a +1 in 2025. No team earned a positive return on trades every year; the Seahawks are the only one at 9/10. Meanwhile, the Colts trail the Seahawks by just a hair in overall score, and they only had two negative years, but it’s still very clear that the lion’s share of their results come from 2018. That was, for those who don’t recall, the year the Colts traded out of 1.03, giving up the pick that became Sam Darnold and getting back the picks that became Quenton Nelson, Braden Smith, Dallas Goedert and Rock Ya-Sin. That was the linchpin of a +170 overall score that year. The Seahawks and Colts nearly got to +400 over their last 10 years. No one else has even climbed above +200.

Of course, with 15 teams with a net positive score across the last decade, that leaves 17 with a net negative:

In a true twist-the-knife scenario, it’s (of course) the Jets who come in at the bottom of the heap, a cool -247. Obviously, the Darnold/Colts trade is a big part of that, but the Jets scored at least a -60 three times (2017, 2018 and 2020) and never had a score better than +21.

Meanwhile, the Eagles are near the bottom of the list at -187. That’s bad … except it’s almost all 2016. The Eagles made two trades involving top-13 picks in 2016 — trading Byron Maxwell, Kiko Alonso and the pick that became Laremy Tunsil to the Dolphins for 1.06 and then flipping that pick to the Browns to trade up to 1.02 to take Carson Wentz — and traded DeMarco Murray and the pick that became Nick Kwiatkoski for the pick that became Connor Cook (also included in the Wentz deal). By AV, they lost all three deals pretty handily. They scored a -175 in 2016 but then only -12 from 2017 to 2025.

32 teams, 10 years. That makes 320 single years of draft trade results. These are the top 10:

We covered the Colts’ 2018 haul that was highlighted by the Sam Darnold/Quenton Nelson deal. They also flipped Henry Anderson for a seventh-round pick that became Zaire Franklin, accounting for most of the rest of the success. The Saints’ 2017 draft class is already the stuff of legend, but part of that involved them flipping Brandin Cooks to the Patriots for the picks that became Ryan Ramczyk and Trey Hendrickson, and trading the picks that became Adrian Colbert and Derrius Guice for the pick that became Alvin Kamara. It’s not just that they nailed their picks that year, it’s that they flipped away some picks that didn’t become much in the process. Also, worth noting the obvious, that all of the top 10 here came in 2016-2019. The highest score since 2020 is the 49ers’ +98 in 2020. The Ravens had a +88 in 2020. The Seahawks cracked +80 in 2022 and 2023. Some of those scores will rise as we get further from the years in question.

The scores obviously have to cancel one another out, so if one team nails a trade, another has to suffer. Here are the bottom 10:

The Bears ended up at a +111 over the last 10 years. That’s good! Only nine teams did better! If they had just not made the Mitchell Trubisky trade in 2017 — sending away the picks that became Solomon Thomas, Alvin Kamara, Tedric Thompson and Fred Warner to move up one slot and draft the quarterback — they would be at +276, third only to the Seahawks and Colts. That one trade was a -175 by itself, the worst single trade in the last decade by a blue mile. We covered the Eagles’ -175 in 2016 and the Jets’ -164 in 2018 earlier. So let’s talk about the Dolphins of 2020. They came in with a cool -165. A big chunk of that came from dealing Minkah Fitzpatrick to the Steelers and getting no studs back, but this was a quantity year — they got a -76 for the Fitzpatrick deal, a -34 for trading the pick that became Jordan Love, a -44 for trading Ryan Tannehill, a -37 for trading the pick that became Darnell Mooney. It was a death-by-a-thousand-papercuts draft. And finally, the 49ers’ 2021 draft is the most recent entry here, the last one with a score worse than -100. That’s famously the draft when the 49ers traded up to draft Trey Lance. And it’s bad enough that Lance flamed out, but one of the picks they sent out for him became Micah Parsons.

If a team makes a thousand trades and gets a +2 on each, it’s doing well. That’s impressive. But if another team makes 50 trades and gets a +100 on each, well, the aggregate is worse, but on a per-trade basis? That team’s nuts. So who did the best per deal?

You remember above, how the Colts were just behind the Seahawks for overall +AV? Well, the Colts have made 34 draft pick trades in the last decade; the Seahawks have made 58. On a per-trade basis, the Colts smoke the field. They’re the only team above +7.0, and they are at +11.4.

Same idea: Who just can’t get any given deal right?

The Bengals haven’t had any single disaster draft from a trading perspective. But then, they’ve only made 20 draft pick trades in the last decade, fewer than anyone but the Chargers. They’ve been in the negative every year that they’ve actually made a trade but 2018, when they came out at a +21. In short, the Bengals lose most of their trades by a fair amount. Never a disaster, but almost always a negative. Might be good news for the Giants, given the Dexter Lawrence II deal.

If your favorite team is going to make a trade this weekend, you should hope it’s with the Jets and try to avoid the Seahawks and Colts. If there is a gun to your GM’s head and he has to make a trade with the next GM he calls, delete Joe Hortiz’s number from his phone. More seriously, the biggest swings in trade fortunes come from two places:

Early trades that are big swings, usually for a quarterback, and don’t pan out.