Draft week is here, as we’re only days away from Chicago Bears being officially put on the clock, and it’s time for me to reveal my final mock draft!
This is based on what I think will happen – which was as challenging as I can ever remember in a year, based on how much uncertainty we have near the top already – rather what I would do if I was running these 32 franchises.
We’ve arrived at the NFL offseason and while the new league year doesn’t official start until March 13th, the franchise/transition tag period was opened on Tuesday and we can already speculate on where pending free agents could end up.
So I took on the exercise of going through all 32 NFL teams listed by effective cap space, talk about some overarching decisions ahead of them and matched each with one player about to hit the open market!
We’ve arrived at the week of Thanksgiving and since I’m in a generous, giving mood, I decided to give something to look forward to for fanbases of the teams that aren’t currently projected to be factors in the playoff picture. And while this includes a couple of teams from the NFC South, that could ultimately still host a playoff game due to the division they’re in, and two .500 teams from the AFC, I think when you look at the list of teams, they all still lack certain elements, which the best way to acquire those is with high draft picks.
I will start by quickly listing the current draft order – if the season ended today – then share my general bird’s-eye view of the upcoming class, before we work our way through each team, shortly discussing their overall state and how they may already look ahead to February through April with their scouting staffs to some degree.
The cut-off for the teams discussed here is pick 16, which makes sense considering the next teams up would be the Bengals and Bills before we get to the current playoff seeds – Cincinnati may have a couple of uncomfortable decisions to make in free agency but were on pace to be one of the most dangerous groups in the AFC, while Buffalo is still very much in the thick of things with the way they looked this past Sunday and being just half a game back from the number seven seed.
The last week of our divisional draft and roster analyses has arrived and we’re finishing up with the NFC and AFC West!
This particular group of four teams is pretty interesting, since two of them could be competing for the conference when it’s all said and done, while the others I would label as two clearly rebuilding franchises.
Kicking off our final week of divisional draft breakdowns, we finish up with the NFC & AFC West!
As always we run through every single pick, talk about their fit on the roster, analyze each class as a whole and then rank them against each other inside the division.
We enter the final week of our divisional draft breakdown series, as always starting with the NFC side of things, as we move West! Let’s talk about the Cardinals, Rams, 49ers and Seahawks!
After talking about the biggest remaining needs for each team in the NFL at this stage of the offseason, I decided to look at the squads that I believe could make a serious improvement and surprise some people in 2018. With that I mean they should exceed expectations despite not being looked at as contenders right now. Therefore I didn’t mention the obvious candidates such as the Packers, who get their franchise QB back, or the Texans, who are everybody’s offseason darling right now. All but one of the upcoming teams missed the postseason by multiple games, with the final one not really being looked at as a playoff team for some reason.
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