Thaler and Massey discovered that, despite the time and money that football teams devoted to studying players, the teams weren’t very good at predicting who would be the best. Those chosen early often had less impressive careers than those chosen later. The chance that a player at a given position turns out to be better than the next player drafted at that same position is only 52 percent, not much better than a coin flip. Predicting the career paths of 22-year-olds in any field is hard.

Consider that neither of the past two Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks (Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady) were chosen at the very top, while several recent #1 picks (like Baker Mayfield and Jameis Winston) have struggled.

And yet N.F.L. teams continue to treat the very top picks as far more valuable than picks slightly further down. They’re often willing to trade multiple picks later in a draft for a single pick near the top. It’s irrational, and predictably so, but the N.F.L. teams can’t help themselves. Executives remember the exceptions — the top picks who turned out to be as good as advertised — and convince themselves that they can pull off another one.

“Even the smartest guys in the world, the guys who spend hours with game film, can’t predict this with much success,” Massey has told me. “There’s no crime in that. The crime is thinking you can predict it.”

The savviest teams have realized they can exploit this irrationality by trading one of their high picks for multiple picks lower down. They effectively swap the ability to choose the one player they want for the ability to take chances on multiple players. They embrace humility. The Dallas Cowboys built a championship team in the 1990s with this approach, and the New England Patriots have done so over the past two decades.