With less than three weeks to go until the 2017 NFL Draft, dozens of football prognosticators are issuing or upgrading their mock drafts. These predictions give us fans something to do as we await the preseason, but I wouldn’t count on their accuracy. Mock, after all, means: bogus, make-believe, phony, faked, pretended, pseudo, false, fraudulent, hokey, spurious.
As I’ve shown before, what draft forecasters can do well is rate the players who are likely to be chosen at the top of the draft and they are good at charting players who are tops at their positions. Trying to connect a given player with a given NFL team, however, is a near impossible dream.
Being a typical Total Packers reader, you want proof, right? I decided to look at last year’s predictions for the Green Bay Packers. I started by taking a look at the mock draft picks for the first three rounds made by a half-dozen national prognosticators. Most or all of these mock draft results that follow were final guesses posted a day before or the day of the 2016 draft.
Chad Reuter – NFL.com
- DT Chris Jones
- ILB Jaylon Smith
- OLB Joe Schobert
Matt Miller, Bleacher Report
- DL Vernon Butler
- ILB Jaylon Smith
- CB James Bradberry
Charlie Campbell – Walter Football
- DT Vernon Butler
- DE/DT Jihad Ward
- ILB Jaylon Smith
Dane Brugler, CBS Sports
- DT Jarran Reed
- ILB Kentrell Brothers
- TE Jerell Adams
Draftsite.com
- ILB Reggie Ragland
- ILB Kentrell Brothers
- CB Zack Sanchez
Fox Sports
- DT Andrew Billings
- DE Jihad Ward
- WR Tyler Boyd
Zero for 18! That got me to wondering if anyone, anywhere, accurately predicted any of the Packers’ first three actual choices.
It turns out that someone at Fox Sports collected the final projections of 41 prognosticators last year – a little more than half picked just a first round choice, while most of the rest projected players for all seven rounds. How many got any of the Packers first three selections correct?
The winner is Ben Volin of the Boston Globe, the only one out of 41 speculators who picked UCLA defensive tackle Kenny Clark as Green Bay’s first selection.
Taking second place is Bob Glauber of Newsday – he picked Indiana tackle Jason Spriggs, but had him going to the Packers in the first round, not the second, which is where he was actually chosen. In third place was Pete Fituak of collegefootballnews.com, who picked Utah State outside linebacker Kyler Fackrell, but had him as Ted Thompson’s second-round, not third-round selection. Vinnie Iyer of The Sporting News gets the booby prize – on the final day before the draft he switched his pick from Kenny Clark to Ohio State outside linebacker Darron Lee.
If you are contemplating making some wagers based on your favorite mock draft guy, I’d rethink that notion.