We’ve arrived at the final week of our divisional draft & roster review series, with the NFC West – which includes the reigning conference champions, the team with the largest draft class across the league, a franchise that finally picked in the first round again after an eight-year break and one of my favorite classes overall.
We complete our trip down South by looking at the AFC side of things with the Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts, Jacksonville Jaguars and Tennessee Titans – discussing all the players these teams drafted, the state of their rosters and how the new pieces fit in!
We kick off the second half of this series with the NFC South – where one team made plenty of noise when the shocked the rest of the league with who they selected in the top ten.
Once again, I’ll be providing scouting reports on all the players selected, talk about their fits within the new team and share my general thoughts on how these rosters have been constructed.
We’re closing week two of this series, where I go through all eight NFL divisions with a heavy focus on the draft and the player acquisition process generally, as we look at the AFC East.
Entering week two of our divisional draft & roster review series, we take a deep dive into the NFC East.
Once again, I will deliver short scouting reports on each individual player selected by these team, what the roster currently looks like and their fit within it, before finishing up with my general thoughts on what these teams did. At the end of the video, I rank the four draft classes against one another.
After kicking off our divisional draft and roster review series with the NFC North earlier in the week, we’re switching conferences and look at the Ravens, Bengals, Browns and Steelers!
I’ll quickly break down each of their new players and relate them to what the rest of the roster and their role within it could look like!
The 2024 NFL Draft is in the books and it’s time to recap all the action. Thursday started off pretty chalky until the Atlanta Falcons sent shockwaves across the internet when they selected Washington quarterback Michael Penix Jr. eighth overall. We didn’t see a defensive player selected until pick number 15. Late in the first round leading into day two, we saw a big run on wide receivers, which the depth of the class was illustrated by 35 total names coming off the board. Offensive tackle came in close behind that with 27 selected and cornerback actually edged out the WRs by one more taken (36), as the two other quality position groups. The big surprise was that we didn’t just get six quarterbacks inside the top-12 to set a new record, but then it took 138 additional spots before we got to QB7.
In this article, I’m going to break down the biggest winners and losers from the weekend, which can be teams overall in terms of the hauls they put together, individual players, coaches or general managers. After that, we’re getting to the biggest steals and reaches, based my individual rankings, consensus boards and general circumstances. All of this of course comes with a certain level of subjectivity and it’ll be another three years before we can make any definitive statements on these new members of the NFL, but I strongly believe in team-building through the draft, understanding where you can acquire value, how to maneuver around the board and how this piece fits into the puzzle, as you consider the way you’ve positioned yourself coming in and the vision behind the operation.
Let’s get into it:
Over the last six-and-a-half weeks, I’ve analyzed the skill-sets of the top ten draft prospects at each position in detail. Now it’s time to put it all together and present my personal big board – numbers one through 100, plus the next 30 names. The way to look at this is thinking of me as a scout for the generic 33rd NFL team, without taking needs and preferences for the franchise into account.
In retrospect, we already knew wide receiver would be insanely deep, illustrated by 17 guys making the cut, but the counterpart group of the cornerback doesn’t finish too far behind with 13 names on here. Meanwhile, running backs and tight-ends are the least-represented groups, with only five guys each. The quarterbacks have driven the conversation throughout the pre-draft process, but you’ll see here shortly that I’m not as high on the group past the top two names as the general consensus.
Keep in mind, I noted injury or off-field concerns with a star (*) and depending on how well I could actually judge how they should impact rankings, I took them into account. The one prospect I excluded here was Texas interior D-lineman T’Vondre Sweat, who we aren’t sure about exactly what the arrest for DWI means for his draft stock.
This is how the board stacks up for me:
It’s time! We’ve broken down in detail the best prospects at every single position now and we close that series out with the quarterbacks. Not only are these of course the most important players on the field, but this is the toughest group to evaluate, because of the different offensive systems they operate in, how we don’t fully understand what their decision-making is based on, with different coaching points and paths to arrive at that point, what they mental make-up looks like, the importance of their supporting case and so many other factors. There I don’t claim to be perfect – like nobody is, especially when it comes to this position – but we steadily try to learn, as the requirements for playing under center at a high level continue to change.
Looking at this year’s class, I believe we have a guy at the top who should be the number one overall pick in basically any draft – at least since I started dabbling into scouting about nine years ago. I believe there’s only one other name worthy of being a top-five selection and he’s being completely overthought. Three more quarterbacks have top-50 grades for me, before we get into a couple of mid-day two options. There are two names I look at as high-floor players with the potential to start for a couple in the right situation, before we get into day three flyers with intriguing arm talent and/or athletic skills.
Here’s what the list looks like for me:
We’ve arrived at the final defensive edition of our positional draft breakdown series. Earlier this week, we discussed the tight-end class, so now it’s time to look at their counterpart – the safeties. With nickel being the most common personnel grouping these days, the body/player type you choose in the slot is crucial for how you can structure the rest of your defense, which I’ll reference the term “big nickel” for, meaning what on paper is a safety being put in that spot, whether that’s for matchup purposes or more importantly run defense on early downs in particular. The labels “strong” and “free safety” are inadequate for today’s game, since barely any teams use them in anymore. More common now is to split the field into boundary (short side) and field/wide side.
This safety group lacks big names at the top, where the two that were commonly found in way too early mock drafts have since slid down the board and it seems highly unlikely we’ll see one selected in the first round. I do still believe there is one that belongs in the early second range at least and this class is surprisingly deep I’d argue, where altogether I believe we see eight or nine taken on day two and then there’s a bunch of package/role players and designated special teamers with plenty of experience on defense, to some degree with pretty diverse roles.
Here’s how I have them stacked up:
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