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 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.
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 …
Now that all my positional draft rankings and big board are out, it’s time to talk about how I think the first round of the draft will shake out. So this is not what I would do, but rather what I think will happen, based on things that I’m hearing and partially my own thoughts, in accordance to what teams want and like from certain positions.
I ended with only three trades, since we’ve already had plenty of movement – indicated by eight(!) teams having multiple first-round picks – and with the general consensus on prospects 15-40 being similarly graded. Therefore, I could see teams want to sit back and let the draft come to them more so. Although as we know, one off-the-radar selection can throw everything else off. We don’t have the Raiders in the first round, but the Seahawks are in the top ten. So we could easily see something crazy happen.
And since I’m a giving person, I added the first pick for every team that doesn’t (currently) hold a selection in round one at the end.
Click the video for my full analysis:
Now that all my positional draft rankings and big board are out, it’s time to talk about how I think the first round of the draft will shake out. So this is not what I would do, but rather what I think will happen, based on things that I’m hearing and partially my own thoughts, in accordance to what teams want and like from certain positions.
I ended with only three trades, since we’ve already had plenty of movement – indicated by eight(!) teams having multiple first-round picks – and with the general consensus on prospects 15-40 being similarly graded. Therefore, I could see teams want to sit back and let the draft come to them more so. Although as we know, one off-the-radar selection can throw everything else off. We don’t have the Raiders in the first round, but the Seahawks are in the top ten. So we could easily see something crazy happen.
And since I’m a giving person, I added the first pick for every team that doesn’t (currently) hold a selection in round one at the end.
Click the video for my full analysis:
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!
All prospects have been evaluated, the rankings have been put out and we are just three days away from the draft. Now it’s time to have some fun!
I have been gathering information in the background and thinking about how Thursday could look like, but this is my one and only mock draft for 2020. To make myself clear – this is what I think will happen, not what I would do.
For every pick, I give a quick analysis on why I think it will happen and how I would grade them, in comparison to my big board.
Here we go:
I have now done all my positional draft rankings, given in-depth analysis of about 150 prospects and put together my top 100 big board. Now it is time for my one and only mock draft of the year. I don’t like doing more than one since it’s all speculation and listening to reports, rather than actually being able to evaluate talent and where these young men should be selected. It is almost impossible to predict draft day trades and there could still be a major chess piece ruling the first round – where will Josh Rosen end up if the Cardinals do go quarterback at number one? Regardless, I tried to predict So to clear this up – This is what I think will happen, not necessarily what I would do.
With the 2017 NFL Draft less than a week from today, I finally put up my predictions for the first round. It is basically impossible to predict all the picks, because of the crazy things happening on draft day every year, whether that be trades or last-minute information coming up, which led to Laremy Tunsil sliding pretty far last year. I decided to leave the order the way it is and try to mock the first round that way. The number one pick should be easy, but nobody really knows for sure what will happen from there on. Each pick can have a domino-effect on the entire draft and things could shape up completely different. Here’s what I came up with:
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