It's the first week of May, which, for my money, is the best week on the entire dynasty calendar. While I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, I think it's fair to say that most of us who play dynasty do so because deep down we think we could do the job of an NFL general manager. Most of us love the NFL Draft.

In established dynasty leagues, rookie drafts are like Christmas. There was nothing better as a kid than the buildup and expectations of Christmas morning and then getting exactly what you wanted. I still remember that 80s Christmas morning when an original NES was under the tree. There were also some Christmases as I got older when most of the familiar expectations were there, but Christmas morning itself was less exciting. At some point, you start getting maybe one present you're excited about (if you're lucky), along with some clothes or something. If I had to sum up my feelings, having completed some early rookie drafts, it's that slightly letdown feeling of some of those lesser Christmas mornings. You may get a great gift if you have an early 1st-round pick. But it gets shaky later in the first round and by the second round of 2026 rookie drafts, there's nothing left to open but the dynasty equivalent of socks and sweaters.

Let's not dwell on the negative, though. Even when the rookie class is as weak as this year's, arguably the weakest rookie skill position group I've seen in the decade I've been writing this article, rookie draft week is still the highlight of the dynasty offseason. To use another analogy: great pizza is amazing. But even mediocre pizza is still pretty good. Bad rookie class or not, it's never hard to get excited about rookie draft season.

May's dynasty trade value chart article will focus on rookie drafts. We'll start with a deep dive on early ADP in rookie drafts. We'll dig deeper into how TE Premium scoring at different TE Premium values is impacting ADP at the position. And we'll look at some trends in the actual dynasty trades involving rookie picks. Let's dive in.

Tools Update

In last month's article, I introduced a major update to my dynasty trade value tool:

DTVC Plus

The last month has been primarily focused on quashing minor bugs and updating the content (base dynasty values, player writeups, etc.) that powers the app.

While most of the improvements in the first few weeks have been incremental and may not be noticeable, I want to emphasize my commitment to steadily upgrading the app each month. One recent upgrade you may notice is that the tool now includes both startup and rookie draft ADP, pulled from hundreds of real leagues that are currently drafting or have recently wrapped up. This updates daily. To toggle to rookie ADP in DTVC Plus, hit the Rookie button here:

Rookie Drafts

The rookie draft ADP in the app will continue to update daily, but let's take a snapshot of those numbers as of May 2nd. Here's how the first three rounds of Superflex rookie drafts have looked so far:

Round 1 Players