Finishing up the first half of our divisional draft & roster breakdown series, we’re looking at the division, currently projected to win the most games league-wide – the AFC East.
Once again, we’re analyzing every single player selected, their role on the new team, those classes overall & how they compare to each other!
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.
We continue our divisional draft & roster review series, switching from the NFC to the AFC North!
Once again, I’ll give a quick scouting report on every single player selected, talk about each team’s class overall & at the end of the video, rank those four against each other!
The draft & roster review series is back for 2023!
Over the next month, we will break down the draft classes of all 32 teams and talk about general roster construction – one division at a name!
We’ll alternate between NFC and AFC weekly, whilst moving around the compass from North to West.
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:
The 2023 NFL Draft is in the books and it’s time to break down everything that happened over the weekend! Obviously everybody got better by adding young talent, but some teams used their draft capital better than others – whether that’s just the players they picked or their overall strategy – and there are selections I was a bigger fan of than others.
So in this article, I will lay out my five biggest winners and losers, as well as my ten biggest steals and reaches respectively. Plus, I added a few more contenders for each category at the end. As far as winners/losers go, this can be a specific team that did really well in terms of how they used their assets, individual prospects, position groups or NFL veterans, due to how they will be affected. The steals/reaches portion is pretty self-explanatory, as I will judge the names selected based on my personal rankings in correlation consensus boards and looking at who was still available or how these picks fit into the overall picture of the draft.
One name I considered as a winner here was Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson, since he signed the contract that in terms of average annual value is the largest in NFL history, before his team got him a new stud receiver in the first round. However, I didn’t want the first half of this equation to factor in too much here, even though in terms of Thursday, nobody had a better 24 hours than him personally.
Let’s break it all down now:
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.
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:
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:
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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