Vox.com: How NFL teams ignore basic economics and draft players irrationally.

[takethecake]

Originally Posted by NC_Skins

Smart front offices keep their picks or trade them for more picks. Bad front offices trade their picks for particular players.

Yes, this is the takeaway. A supplement to this is the philosophy of letting your UFAs walk instead of overpaying to keep them. A compensatory pick and cap space almost always puts you in a better spot than paying dannell ellerbe $7 mil/year lol. Likewise, some teams are vastly better than others at realizing when a player's nearing the end, and recouping some value for them via trade. If you want to be a successful GM in the nfl, following those two tenets will get you a long way.

And for the record, you can't declare winners and losers in the rg3 trade yet, and especially not via division titles. Pretty sure the NFC east doesn't have the 49ers and seahawks...