Draft Value article from Barnwell at Grantland

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2. New Orleans Saints
Expected Draft Value: 46.2 points (Rank: 13rd)
Actual Draft Value: 62.1 points (Rank: Third)
Difference: 34.5 percent

Look back at what the Saints did this offseason and you can see how their plan formed. Sean Payton and Mickey Loomis presided over a wildly disappointing 2014 team that failed to live up to lofty expectations, primarily thanks to the league’s second-worst defense. Given that the Saints were more than $20 million over the salary cap, it was going to be virtually impossible to make wholesale changes.

That is, of course, unless they somehow found a way to acquire a bunch of low-cost, high-upside assets. Those are draft picks, and Loomis got a bunch of them. It cost the Saints a fourth-round pick and a trio of offensive starters in Jimmy Graham, Ben Grubbs, and Kenny Stills, but the Saints came away from their offseason trade spree with the 31st, 78th, and 154th picks in this year’s draft. Even after subtracting the fourth-rounder, those 17.5 points amount to the expected return of a mid-first-round pick. The Saints now have three of the first 50 picks and five of the first 80.

Of course, you can’t just write off trading a weapon like Graham as an easy call. Loomis is the same guy who gave Jairus Byrd an enormous deal and signed Champ Bailey to start at cornerback last offseason, and both of those moves turned out to be mistakes. But if you figure that a team with Payton and Brees can create playmakers on offense a lot more easily than it can on the other side of the football, repositioning its assets toward defense makes a lot of sense. And given that the Saints are all in with Brees over the next two seasons, if they want to make the same sort of defensive leap that led them to the Super Bowl in 2009, it’s going to come from young, cheap talent on defense.

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