OK, I’m going to break a rule of mine with this post, and I’m going to write about my home team, the Jacksonville Jaguars. (This probably won’t be the last time I break it.) With that said, this draft really excited me. I feel a number of teams found some incredible value last weekend, and I’ll take a look at several of them coming up. But I have to start off with my team.
I thought it would be a waste of both your time and mine to write up reviews about teams’ performance in the draft if I didn’t have an opinion or if my opinion was the same as the consensus. “He took a guy ten spots above where he should have been according to a draft guru’s value board” isn’t a compelling argument. I think it’s time that us writers concede we don’t really know that much about where actual teams rank players. Lots of writers also don’t seem to understand that minute differences in player evaluations can add up to make a player seem like a reach. (For example, Johnny Columnist has Blue Chipper ranked #40; other draft gurus, on average, rank him #35. Then, Team A, who picks at 35, has him ranked #25, but so does Team B, who has the 30th pick, so Team A starts fielding offers to trade up around the 25th pick. The only team willing to trade down is at #22, so they trade up to 22 and take Mr. Chipper.)
Johnny Columnist writes, “What a terrible reach! They took my #40 prospect at 22!”
That seems like a pointless evaluation, because it both ignores the dynamics of a competitive draft and because, let’s face it, how much more valuable are Johnny Columnist’s rankings than a particular team’s as regards its specific needs and the attributes its front office and coaches value in players?
All those caveats aside, that’s a long-winded way of saying I was fine with the 49ers trading up to #18 for Eric Reid.
Here are some teams whose moves were on my mind and why. In fact, since I’m already writing about San Francisco, let’s start with them: Continue reading
Analysis of Round One later. Right now, no explanations, just picks (and a couple of trades):
I’ve never known enough information about how teams choose selections to do a true mock draft. (ed. note– that never stops the rest of us!) I leave that for others. Instead, I like to rank the players in the order I’d put them on my Big Board if I was in the draft room. So, this is my “Big Board” for tonight’s draft. I’ve only done my top 40, plus noted where I ranked a couple of guys many people once considered first-rounders.
With the draft just a few hours away, I’ve got some more film review of prospects for our readers to look over. Today we have a couple of guys who have been slowly creeping up the board and are now likely first-round picks.
I’ll roll out my final mock draft tomorrow, but I had the idea for an intellectual exercise beforehand. Since the draft always has some major surprises– some teams play it straight with the media, many more don’t– I thought I would try my best to “predict” how some of those picks might happen, where a team (or teams) values a player more highly than the draft-community consensus, or where a team has expressed no interest in a player who seems suited to the team.
Having said that, I did my best to keep players as close to their legitimate value as possible, but more importantly, I chose players whom I thought would help the team, and I’ve explained why. The only catch is that, to the best of my knowledge and research, I’ve not seen these players and teams linked anywhere else.
Read on to see what Kansas City probably won’t do with the first pick in the 2013 NFL Draft…
In this post, we’ll be looking at two potential first-round picks on defense, Missouri DT Sheldon Richardson and Kansas State LB Arthur Brown.
In these next few posts, I’ve looked at some college tape on draft prospects and recorded my thoughts and commentary. Watch the videos and read a bit of my commentary at the end.
We’re going to start with two of the top-ranked defensive prospects in this draft, Alabama cornerback Dee Milliner and BYU defensive end Ezekiel “Ziggy” Ansah, as well as an offensive lineman who has a chance to leap to the top of his position, North Carolina guard Jonathan Cooper.
Working from the first round I posted earlier this week, let’s move on to round two. Round three will likely be up tomorrow.
Picks 1-16 are here. Let’s get into the second half of the first round…
Compensatory picks have been handed out, free agency has died down, and many pro days have passed. I figured with 15 days until the draft, I might as well take another spin at it. I’m doing my best to match value to need; of course, real teams won’t be working from the same value board and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the real draft vary wildly. (That’s why I’m stopping at three rounds; teams’ needs and boards diverge so much after that that I don’t think it’s remotely possible to be accurate.)
I don’t really feel qualified to rank prospects, though some of our film-watchers here at the blog might, so I choose the mock-draft format instead. This one will mostly contain shorter writeups than the last, since I’ve already gone over these players in more detail there. The first half of round one coming up…
For this entry in my series, I’ve decided, by request from a reader, to look at Cordy Glenn. He wanted to know if the Bills hit a home run with a left tackle chosen in the second round. Well… why don’t we check it out?
Zone Reads 