Trading down in the NFL draft is still free money. Despite significant evidence -- including research by Wharton professor Cade Massey and Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler -- suggesting that teams regularly overpay when trading up, the market remains inefficient and teams continue to pay a premium to move up year after year.
At its core, this boils down to overconfidence in player evaluation: the difference in the chance that, for example, WR2 will outperform WR3 does not justify the price teams pay to make that distinction (see: the price the 49ers paid for Trey Lance vs.