2025 NFL Draft – Consensus Draft Picks & Prospects – Top 50
Welcome to the 2025 NFL Draft Top 50 Consensus Picks & Prospects forecast. This is the first in a series of 2025 NFL Draft articles, and it will focus on the projected top 50 picks and players based on the mock drafts of experts and the public. This article will be followed by one projecting 1st round draft trades and the cost of doing so for every team, and a final article post draft to see which GM won the draft when it came to negotiating trades and pick swaps.
In order to do all this, we need to use a NFL Draft Trade Chart. Most NFL teams use either the Johnson Trade Chart or the HIll Trade Chart. Last year I create a synthesis of these two charts which I called the Johnson-Hill Chart. It basically multiplies all the values of the HIll chart by 3, then averages the values from the two charts to create the final values.
Below you can see the Johnson-Hill Trade Chart values for each pick in the 2025 NFL Draft. Offseason trades are in PINK, while trades made during the 2024 season, or before, are in BLUE. A pick that hasn’t changed hands is in BLACK.
The Value of Future Draft Picks
The values at the bottom are the value of future round picks. There are two ways this value is normally calculated: Either by the average value of a pick 1 round below the traded pick or by using the value of the 18th pick in the round of the traded pick.
The value of the 18th pick of the round is the slot for the last non playoff team. Thus a future 1st round draft pick is evaluated as being equal to the 18th pick in round 1. In the chart the 18th pick is worth 881 points. However because the pick is in the future, team normally decrease the pick’s value by one round. Thus getting a 2026 1st round pick is looked at as being equal to a 2025 2nd round pick. Teams simply see less value in future assets.
Now the average value of a 2nd round pick is only 383 points, which seems like too big of a drop from the 881 points the 18th pick is worth. The bottom number, Round Average, is simply the average value of the two methods. 881 + 393 = 1274 /2 = 637 points(636.8 in the last line of the chart for round one). This equates to between the 28th & 29th pick in the first round. Thus, it is less than the 18th pick, but worth more than an average 2nd round pick. So the discount for the future first ends up being about 10 spots in the first round. This same method is used to obtain a value for furture 2nd through 7th round picks as well.
Top 50 Picks & Players
In order to create a consensus Top 50 picks & players chosen in the 2025 NFL Draft, we needed a way to score all the mock drafts. The way we are going to score them is by using the Johnson-Hill Draft Trade Chart. Very simply, in each mock draft, the player is given the amount of points equal to the value of the draft position they were selected in during each mock draft.
I choose to use 4 ESPN Drafts: Kiper, Miller, Reid, & Yates. I also used 4 NFL.com Drafts: Ross, Zierlein, Davis & Brooks. Finally I used the consesus picks made by thousands of public mock drafts at nflmockdraftdatabase.com.
ESPN 2025 NFL Mock Drafts
NFL.com 2025 NFL Mock Drafts
Consensus 2025 NFL Mock Drafts
As you can see, for the ESPN and NFL.com drafts, there are only 32 picks. The four ESPN analysts project 39 different players could be picked in the first round. Clearly only 32 can be picked, but 39 players appear among the 4 mock 1st round drafts. The four NFL.com analysts project 42 different players among their four 1st round mock drafts.
To add some spice to the mix, I took the Top 50 consensus players projected from the draft database, and assigned all of them 4x the value of the draft slot they were drafted in. Thus ESPN, NFL.com & the public each have 1/3 of the weight in the final Top 50 draft projections.
Below you can see the ESPN, NFL.com, & Consensus players and point values. The combined ranking show the consensus among the three sources. The Prospect rank was also culled from the the draft database site, but those rankings are supposed to be regardless of team need. In other words, the prospect rank is the true rank of the players in a vacuum.
