Draft season is a long, slow slog in the media. Whether you consume your offseason content on a website like this one, by watching NFL Network, or listening to podcasts, you are probably inundated with mock drafts by this time of year. If you find that fun, don’t worry — I’m not going to complain about the monotony of mock drafts or try to convince anyone that they’re bad. On the contrary, I want to show you, dear reader, just how much cooler mock drafts can be.
That said, there are too many mock drafts. Every writer has a mock draft written up. Every fan has gone through a mock simulator at least a few times. We are oversaturated with simulation after simulation. Every plausible permutation has been suggested. It’s old. But the problem is not with mock drafts themselves. It is that we aren’t approaching them in a way that gets the most out of the exercise. We can turn mock drafts into so much more. Instead, we toil at the surface level until we are bored of it.
At their core, mock drafts are our way of skipping to the day we’re sick of waiting for. Draft weekend is exciting, so let’s whet our appetites with a pretend one. Each mock draft is unique, unlike any other. Whether they simulate all 32 picks in the first round or go all the way through the draft for a single team, they’re all different. And yet, with almost a month to go before the actual draft, they feel tedious.
The plurality of mock drafting only scratches the surface of draft season analysis. The bare minimum for a successful mock draft post is easy. Simply run your favorite team through a draft simulator, click some names, puke out a quick sentence or two on each one, and watch the engagement roll in. I promised a mock draft, so here’s one for the Minnesota Vikings that took me about 20 minutes to whip up.
- Round 1, Pick 12: Derek Stingley, Jr. CB LSU – Patrick Peterson won’t be around forever. For his heir apparent, why not draw from Peterson’s alma mater?
- Round 2, Pick 46: Boye Mafe, Edge, Minnesota – In the second round, a hometown kid that can help round out the base front of Ed Donatell’s 3-4.
- Round 3, Pick 77: Coby Bryant, CB Cincinnati – The Vikings are thin enough at cornerback to justify a double-dip in the first two days. Bryant was a good CB2 in Cincinnati when paired with Sauce Gardner.
- Round 5, Pick 156: Smoke Monday, S, Auburn – Smoke Monday is a physical, downhill safety. If he can learn a little more about reading plays, he could push Camryn Bynum or even play next to him when Harrison Smith retires.
- Round 6, Pick 184: Danny Gray, WR SMU – You can never have too many receivers. Danny Gray broke out at SMU and could have been drafted much higher if he went to a bigger school.
- Round 6, Pick 191: Zakoby McClain, LB, Auburn – McClain made a lot of plays at Auburn despite his limited athleticism.
- Round 6, Pick 192: Jalen Wydermyer, TE, Texas A&M – Wydermyer flunked the combine but was very productive for the Aggies. He’d reunite with Kellen Mond.
- Round 7, Pick 250: Jeremiah Gemmel, LB North Carolina – Gemmel was a leader for the Tar Heels with the mental acuity to make plays and lead the defense.
Now that you’ve read that, let’s assess what we learned from it. If you’re reading a football article in April, you almost certainly have an opinion on Derek Stingley, Jr. already. If you’re a Minnesotan, you probably like the idea of Boye Mafe coming to play for the Vikings. If you’re not Minnesotan, there’s a good chance you know about him anyways and have an opinion about how he fits the Vikings. Depending on how many mock drafts you’ve read so far, you might recognize all but a few of the latest selections in the above mock.
Think about how you processed this mock draft. What were your first thoughts? Did you immediately compare your opinions of Stingley, Mafe, Bryant, etc. to mine? Did you think about which picks you agree or disagree with? Did you consider that I picked just two offensive players, both in the sixth, and no offensive linemen? Or perhaps you just considered the sequence of positions that I drafted in the first three rounds (cornerback/edge rusher/cornerback). How much did you think about lesser-known players like McClain or Gemmel?
All of these surface-level reflex questions compare your opinions to mine. Maybe you think the Vikings should draft two defensive players and one offensive one in the first three rounds. Since I went all defense, you think I should have gone offense with one of those picks instead. That’s fine, and might even be fun a couple of times to go back and forth.
After a while, though, what can a reader gain from this? What do you walk away with that you didn’t have before? Do you know anything new about Stingley from reading this? You almost certainly don’t. With Mafe, I just shared a thought I had about the Minnesota Vikings drafting a player from the Minnesota Gophers. You either agree with that already or you don’t, and simply saying the thought out loud won’t change your mind either way. That is the issue with the vast majority of mock drafts: They don’t challenge you. They just list some names, you decide if drafting those positions in that order is good or not, and you move on.
There are some facets of mock drafts that are worth the effort as they are. Some mocks, like this one from Arif Hasan, go into enough depth about their decision-making and the prospects themselves that they are worth the read. Even if you disagree with Hasan (and plenty of people do), you still walk away with something valuable. Ultimately, don’t we want something more than to read words we already agree with?
One simple idea is to examine a large volume of mock drafts in the aggregate. Benjamin Robinson’s Grinding The Mocks project is a great tool to get to know a player better than you could from any single mock draft. Take Wydermyer, for example. In that mock, I simply pointed out that he went to the same school as Kellen Mond and tested poorly at the combine. In a better version, I could point out that Wydermyer’s fall pre-dated his combine as his production didn’t take the leap that many anticipated when projecting him in the first round last summer.
There are 262 picks in this draft and over 500 prospects that will don at least a practice jersey for an NFL team for some time. That’s way too much information for any one person to fully comprehend. You are not going to watch film on all of them. Mock drafts give us a context in which to target the players we care about. Instead of processing a mock draft, train your energy on the players in mock drafts you haven’t heard of or considered before. Use simulations as an excuse to get to know as many players as you have the energy for.
Mock simulators, such as The Draft Network’s or Pro Football Network’s, are a fun way to pass time in April while we wait for the real thing. They can also get real old, real fast. Mostly, this is because we approach it with the same goal every time: to generate the best possible draft for our favorite team. Do a few simulations in a row and you’ll notice yourself taking your favorite players over and over. That can be a good method to identify who those favorites are, or perhaps where those simulators are too low on a player.
I do a mock draft every Monday on Locked On Vikings. To guard against that monotony, I restrict myself from ever taking the same player twice. It means my mocks won’t generate as good of classes as other mocks, but that shouldn’t be the goal. I’m not trying to propose the best possible draft class to you. There’s more value in me introducing you to as many players as I can and equipping you to come up with your own favorites.
The most powerful thing a mock draft can do is tell you about the landscape of the draft. For example, the 2020 draft was deeply populated with quality offensive tackles. If you did enough mock-draft simulators that year, you’d have realized that taking a tackle in the first round was unnecessary. By the second round, you were looking at a board with no receivers or corners left, a decent amount of tackles, and you’ve already picked one.
From that, we learned that the Vikings could afford to take a wide receiver and a cornerback with their first-round picks and grab whichever tackles fell to Round 2. The Vikings did exactly that, selecting Ezra Cleveland after the tackle-needy teams gobbled up Tristan Wirfs, Jedrick Wills, and so on.
Try doing a mock-draft simulation with self-imposed challenges. The Vikings need a cornerback, but what if they don’t select one in the first round? Try a simulation where you are not allowed to take a corner in the first round, and see if you can still put together a draft you like. If you can, great! Maybe you don’t have to be so attached to Stingley or Sauce Gardner. If you can’t, then a first-round corner is a must. Maybe that will tell you that the Vikings need to trade up for a cornerback or reach on a cornerback like Washington’s Trent McDuffie higher than you would have liked. Or maybe it will go well on Day 2, and that would tell you that there’s no urgency.
Compare this methodology to reading a mock draft. Maybe that author came to the conclusion that a first-round corner is non-negotiable (Hasan’s mock, for example, takes McDuffie in the first round). But with our simulation game, we got a better understanding of the landscape that leads to the pick. Picking Trent McDuffie at 12 might be a reach, but now we can decide for ourselves if that reach is justified. We can add a layer that otherwise isn’t there.
Instead of a binary (“I like/don’t like Trent McDuffie”) you start to develop a more complex opinion (“I don’t love McDuffie, but I’d prefer him to a scenario where we don’t have any cornerback in the first round”). Those complexities do a better just of mimicking the calculus that actual teams have to do on draft weekend.
You’re not bored of mock drafts because mock drafts are inherently bad. You’re bored of them because you are not challenging the format enough. By expanding your use of mock drafts beyond the obvious, we can better familiarize ourselves with the draft board. Mock drafts become fun again when they become about learning the board as a whole. Draft weekend itself is a whole new experience when you add a little familiarity with the board. Mock drafts can be a vital tool to help us do that. We just have to think outside the box a little.
