Tag Archives: College Football

College Football, NFL Draft

Biggest standouts from the 2024 college all-star events:

The 2023/24 NFL season has come to a close, but we immediately transition into draft season, as all 32 teams have their eyes set on which young talent they want to bring in as their quest to Super Bowl 59 starts.

Some key events of the calendar have already taken place, when many of the top prospects tried to impress scouts and decision-makers across the league across multiple college all-star events. I did watch the Hula and Tropical Bowl games, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll be focusing on the Shrine and Senior Bowl. For the participants there, I already had done some background work and could contextualize what I saw across three days of practice plus the actual games.

I’ll discuss the ten players on offense and defense each, who impressed me the most and should be moving up draft boards thanks to their performances – I actually ended up going with ten each for both events. At the end, I listed several other players who helped themselves during the early stages of the process.

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College Football

The top five college players at each position in 2023:

Three weeks into the 2023 college football season, I decided it was time to give an overview of the landscape and list my top players in the nation right now, going through each position. Generally I tried to stick with five or six names – if there was a tie for number five – but for some of these I felt the need to quickly outline one other player, who I struggled with ranking due to different circumstances, but looked at as worthy of bringing up in this discussion.

Please bear in my mind that I look at this through the lens of where these guys are right now at the college level, rather than evaluating them as NFL Draft prospects – there’ll be plenty of time for late from February until the end of April and beyond – although I may mention certain qualities/question marks that will ultimately be discussed further. So look at this as “If I had to play a college game today, who would I pick for my team?”. I went a little further in depth about the quarterbacks, while trying to give more of a general understanding of the other positions.

And just a quick note – some players that were in the running for me when I started putting together this list before the season kicked off, but haven’t yet played at all or have gotten hurt and therefore didn’t qualify – QB Michael Pratt (Tulane), WR Zakhari Franklin (Ole Miss), WR Ladd McConkey (Georgia), TE Brant Kuithe (Utah), LB Jestin Jacobs (Oregon) and SAF Rod Moore (Michigan).

Let’s get into the list:


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NFL Draft

NFC East 2023 draft & roster review

Kicking off week two of our divisional draft & roster breakdown series, we’re looking at the Cowboys, Giants, Eagles & Commanders.

I’m looking at the draft classes of each team, give a quick scouting report on every single player selected, how the new faces fit within the rest of the roster and then compare the classes against each other.

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NFL Draft

Which undrafted free agents could make an impact in 2023:

We’ve spent a ton of time talking about all these highly-rated prospects for the NFL Draft and where they landed. So I wanted to once again show love to the guys who didn’t hear their names called, but have now been signed as UDFAs and have a chance to still make their mark on the league.

I settled on six players on offense and defense each, who I thought are in a situation to quickly make an impact – whether that’s actually having a chance to start at some point this this year or just fill a certain role for their new team. I tried to not include players that are widely considered to have gone undrafted due to medical red flags, although I added (at least) one more name for all the teams I didn’t mention among these twelve, at the end of this piece.

Here’s the list:


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NFL Draft

My ultimate 2023 NFL Mock Draft (including picks for non-first-round teams):

We have made it! The 2023 NFL Draft is just days away and after grinding away at film of over 300 prospects, I’m once again trying to do the impossible exercise of predicting what will actually happen in the first round, along with showing love to the fanbases of those teams currently without a pick on day one and linking prospects to them.

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NFL Draft

The top 100 overall prospects of the 2023 NFL Draft:

All position rankings for this year’s NFL draft are out. So now it’s time to combine them all into my personal big board! Along with the 100 names here, I added the “next 30”, since I felt bad for leaving them off, considering the difference between them and they last few guys who made the cut is fairly marginal and I would be fine with anybody from that group being picked on day two.

Just to clarify, this isn’t necessarily how I would end up selecting these players, because while I do take positional value into account to a certain extent, I obviously understand what certain draft capital is worth and the investments teams picking up high are in position to / should make.

With 13 prospects respectively, the wide receiver and edge defender groups lead the way, closely followed by 12 cornerbacks. Only five quarterbacks quite made the cut – with a couple slightly outside the top-100 – while interior offensive and defensive line are both only represented with eight names.

Here’s the full list:


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NFL Draft

Top 10 safeties of the 2023 NFL Draft:

We have arrived at the final defensive segment of our positional draft breakdowns! In this edition, we’ll look at the top safeties available, which is always a somewhat challenging group, just because of where you project guys to play at the next level already. Whether it’s cornerbacks who will make the transition or some guys who could be seen as safeties or pure sub-packagelinebackers.

This class includes three names just in my personal top five, who primarily played nickel at the collegiate level and actually project best to stay there as they move on to the NFL, but otherwise their skill-set lends itself more to safety than outside corner. The rest of the list consists of a bunch of combo safeties, who can fill a multitude of roles and will offer their future defensive coordinators flexibility in terms of how they’re deployed, even though they aren’t necessarily great in one specific area. That’s sort of a sign of the NFL becoming more split-safety centric, where those guys are asked to fill a lot of different shoes.

Here’s what the top-ten looks like for me, along with a couple of guys that just missed the cut:


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NFL Draft

Top 10 tight-ends of the 2023 NFL Draft:

We’re entering our final full week of positional draft rankings, as we’ve gone through an offensive and defensive group for four weeks already – running backs and linebackers, wide receivers and cornerbacks, offensive tackles and edge defenders, interior offensive and defensive linemen. Today we’ll be looking at what I believe is the best tight-end class of the last decade and then on Friday we shift to the safeties, before finishing up with quarterbacks.

Since I just praised the group as a whole, let me say that there are five guys I currently have top-50 grades on, plus another I have in the late second-/early third-round range. There is a certain drop-off after that, but this entire top-ten could potentially make it inside my top-100 big board next week and even beyond that, there are some intriguing options, to a point where we may see a couple TE2s stick on teams as undrafted free agents or at least late day-three selections. This is a class however, where I didn’t really struggle in terms of ordering the top-seven names. After that, there was some more debate for me.

This is what I came up with:


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NFL Draft

Top 10 interior defensive linemen of the 2023 NFL Draft:

Finishing up our conversations on the top linemen inside and out on both sides of the ball, we end on the best interior defenders. While plenty of these prospects have flexibility in terms of alignment, based on main position, this list includes anything from a true zero-technique nose-tackle all the way out to a base D-end in a 3-4, lining up at five-technique straight across the offensive tackle.

This group includes what many consider the most talented all-around player in this draft. After that, I believe there are two more guys worthy of going in the first round, along with another three names I have second-round grades on and a kid who will go some time on day two I would think, largely dependent on how teams value a fairly narrow role. After that, there are a couple of names I value higher than consensus rankings and I think you can find useful pieces for certain roles way down the line potentially, but in terms of complete players that will play on all three downs, the board drops off pretty dramatically.

Here’s what it looks like to me:


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NFL Draft

Top 10 running backs of the 2023 NFL Draft:

It’s positional draft rankings time! As I outlined on social media and my most recent video on the biggest risers and fallers from the NFL combine, over the next five-and-a-half weeks, I will be releasing top ten lists for each position in the draft. That means two groups every week, starting with running backs and linebackers, and I will follow that theme of talking about an offensive position first and then their defensive counterpart (wide receiver – cornerback, offensive tackle – edge defender, etc.).

As far as this running back class is concerned, we have a legit superstar prospect at the top, who draft evaluators have long held in high regard and were just waiting for to declare. I also think there’s a pretty clear number two – who might actually be underdiscussed – and number three has remained steady throughout this process for me as well. After that, you can argue there’s about ten names in one big bucket, where it largely depends on what flavor your team is looking for. Not all of them will, but I would have no problem with any one of them coming off the board before day. Even after that, there are a lot useful players, who you can find in the later rounds and be contributors for you to a certain degree.

This is how I have them stacked up:

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