We’re about three weeks away from the 2024 NFL Draft and to complement all my positional rankings, I wanted to highlight some prospects that I haven’t gotten to yet or were outside the top-10/12 in their respective classes, who I believe are being undervalued on consensus boards and I wanted to plant my flag on as “my guys”.
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.
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.
We have arrived at the end of our positional draft rankings for this year and of course we finish up with the most-discussed group – the quarterbacks. I like to always conclude this series with the signal-callers, because with all the other positions, I can tick boxes and rank them in a more straight-forward manner, while this is the toughest spot to evaluate. So many things have to go right in their development and more than anywhere else, landing spot is a major factor. I try to weigh physical talent, mental fortitude, the knack for being a play-maker and the poise these guys play with, in accordance to ever-changing demands for the position.
To me there’s a big three, that I can see in any order depending on who you ask, and all are worthy of being top-ten picks. Then there’s one prospect more I believe belongs in the first round, before we have a major drop-off to three names I have in the third- to early fourth-round range. The final three names I believe have the potential to develop into sport-starters, but I personally wouldn’t be comfortable with ahead of day three. Beyond that point, there are a few guys I think could turn themselves into quality backups, along a couple of names sprinkled in that have some starter tools, but are far from a point where they can be real-time contributors at the pro level.
Here is my final top ten for 2023:
Week two of our positional draft rankings is here. After breaking down the top running backs and linebackers in this year’s class, it’s time to talk about these wide receiver prospects. Once again, these are simply my personal rankings, without taking team fits and needs into account. So these boards will look a lot different depending on who you ask and especially with this position, I believe there will be a lot of variance for how teams have guys stacked up.
I believe there’s a pretty clear top tier, which includes four names we’ve all commonly seen get mocked in the first round. I don’t believe there’s a Ja’Marr Chase in this class or that this is as strong a group as we had last year, with Drake London and the two Ohio State guys. However, all four of these names should go on day one. After that, there’s a significant gap to the next group, which is where I have a few names mixed in, who I rarely hear being brought up. The rest of the top ten will all be top-100 prospects for me and at the end, I talk about one more guy, who I really struggled to find a place for. The real strength of this class however is the abundance of day-three targets, where altogether I watched more than 30 prospects with a chance of contributing at the next level.
Let’s dive into this:
After kicking things off with the running backs earlier this week, we’re switching over to the defensive side for the first time for these positional draft breakdowns and look at this linebacker class. Especially as we get to these positions on defense, where what you covet depends so much on what your scheme asks of players and how play-callers utilize these guys, boards will look a lot different for each team. So this is just me looking at this from a more general standpoint and ranking these prospects based on how valuable their skill-sets can be for the NFL.
It’s kind of an ambiguous group of linebackers this year I believe, because as we get to the edge defenders a couple of weeks from now, you’ll see that there’s some overlap, where a player may be defined differently depending on who you ask. Wisconsin’s Nick Herbig for example will be part of my edge rundown, rather be listed here.
I don’t think there’s a single clear-cut first-rounder, taking positional value into account, but the first four names should all go in the second round and then there’s about seven names I think have a case to go in the third. After that, there are quite a few names, who can fill a certain role and contribute on special teams, but overall there are just too many guys I think are undersized or lack a certain quality, for me to call this a strong class.
This is how I have these names stacked up:
Originally, I didn’t intend on writing about anything football-related this week, since there’ll be a ton of discourse coming out of Indianapolis over the next few days and I have a big recap of the scouting combined planned in video form next week. However, as team personnel and media members get together and information is exchanged, I thought we should take a sober look at the NFL landscape before smokescreens are about to be put out there and people are trying to create different narratives, specifically as it pertains to the draft. Of course, there’ll be legit storylines coming out of this as well, but you can’t allow this new information to change your view too much here.
So I decided to sort of create a blueprint for what I believe the first round may look like on April 27th, based on having watched all the players on tape – without testing numbers influencing our opinion – and understanding how different teams operate, what their needs currently are and how they may approach the offseason. I’ll be walking you all through picks one to 31 (or 32, if you count Miami’s forfeited selection) and break them up into certain segments, which could alter what happens next.
Let’s start with …
The 2021 NFL Draft is in the books and as always, we have to analyze what all 32 teams did over the course of three days, to improve their roster. Once again, I will outline the biggest winners and losers, steals and reaches from the eventful extended weekend, according to my draft grades, how teams deployed their resources, how they addressed needs and how it affects players, that are already in the league.
Obviously, the results will only really come in, when we know about what pro players these college prospects have turned into two or three years down the line, but in terms of the way teams operated the whole process and how good I perceive these selections to be, based on my rankings and information (some medicals and character stuff I don’t know about), I will make my judgments.
I will break down every single division in detail on my Youtube channel two weeks from now, after I talk about some of my favorite UDFA signings, and make sure to check out all my positional rankings, big board and much mere right here on this page!
All draft prospects have been analysed in-depth and ranked against each other. Now it’s time to predict what will happen when Thursday night rolls around, as I present my one and only mock draft of the year.
There’s going to be a bit of a surprise quarterback at number three – even though the name has gotten some steam lately – the big three receivers go early, but then people wait a little bit because they know how deep the class is, there will be kind of a late run on edge rushers and I have only one running back going in the first round. The big thing here is two of my top ten overall prospects don’t hear their names called in this first round due to injuries, largely because without any medical information, it was hard for me to actually put things into context and project where these guys will go.
As far as trades go, I tried to stay close to what the NFL Trade Value Chart says and didn’t include any picks from future years, to keep things fairly simple. To me this clear – this is not what I would do necessarily, but more so what I think will ultimately happen.
Make sure to check out all my detailed positional breakdowns here and/or on my Youtube channel!
Now let’s get into this thing!
Now that all the positional rankings have been released, it’s time to put it all together and present my personal big board. Since we’re looking at this from an outside perspective, team-specific boards of course will look different. However, I wanted to give a more general overview and just rank the top 100 overall prospects, regardless of position.
As far as injuries and other factors go, I tried to consider injuries, that I can actually project forward, like torn ACLs and Achilles tendons. For prospects like Virginia Tech’s Caleb Farley, Miami’s Jaelan Phillips and Kentucky’s Kelvin Joseph, I just can’t put clean-up back procedures, concussion histories or bad environments around them into relation, so I’m not going to try. Teams that have the medical and background information may want to drop them down the board, because of those factors.
Make sure to check out my in-depth positional breakdowns here and/or on Youtube, for my analysis on all of these players, and feel free to let me know your thoughts!
This is what I came up with:
Now that all the positional rankings have been released, it’s time to put it all together and present my personal big board. Since we’re looking at this from an outside perspective, team-specific boards of course will look different. However, I wanted to give a more general overview and just rank the top 100 overall prospects, regardless of position.
As far as injuries and other factors go, I tried to consider injuries, that I can actually project forward, like torn ACLs and Achilles tendons. For prospects like Virginia Tech’s Caleb Farley, Miami’s Jaelan Phillips and Kentucky’s Kelvin Joseph, I just can’t put clean-up back procedures, concussion histories or bad environments around them into relation, so I’m not going to try. Teams that have the medical and background information may want to drop them down the board, because of those factors.
Make sure to check out my in-depth positional breakdowns here and/or on Youtube, for my analysis on all of these players, and feel free to let me know your thoughts!
This is what I came up with:
Now that all the positional rankings have been released, it’s time to put it all together and present my personal big board. Since we’re looking at this from an outside perspective, team-specific boards of course will look different. However, I wanted to give a more general overview and just rank the top 100 overall prospects, regardless of position.
As far as injuries and other factors go, I tried to consider injuries, that I can actually project forward, like torn ACLs and Achilles tendons. For prospects like Virginia Tech’s Caleb Farley, Miami’s Jaelan Phillips and Kentucky’s Kelvin Joseph, I just can’t put clean-up back procedures, concussion histories or bad environments around them into relation, so I’m not going to try. Teams that have the medical and background information may want to drop them down the board, because of those factors.
Make sure to check out my in-depth positional breakdowns here and/or on Youtube, for my analysis on all of these players, and feel free to let me know your thoughts!
This is what I came up with:
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