By now everyone probably knows that the long-term statistics of NFL draft trades favor the team trading down over the team trading up. The original Jimmy Johnson trade value chart, which was based on his own view of the value of different draft slots, greatly favored higher, and especially early Round 1, draft picks over lower picks. More recent studies suggest a much flatter draft value curve, based on things like the historical monetary value of second contracts given by the NFL to players drafted at different positions in the draft.
New York Giants general manager Joe Schoen’s analytics department has surely made him aware of those statistics if he wasn’t already, and indeed in last year’s draft he engineered two trade-downs.