Mock
I wrote a complainer article for Football Savages around this time last year on this subject, but I’m gonna take my time to KFC double down on this bitch and complain some more, because it’s that time of year, my friends.

I’m glad football is popular enough to warrant year round news coverage. I truly am. As a snarky sports jerk, that’s pretty much fantastic. You think I have it tough when the season ends? Hell no, man! After that Super Bowl ends we get three months of draft coverage! Prospects! The Combine! Draft stock! Mel Kiper hair sightings on a regular basis! Awwwww yissssss.

But then there are mock drafts.

I hate them. They are stupid. They are essentially one step above Power Rankings in usefulness. The worst part is the absolute infestation of them that we face every March-April after the combine (but even before). Mock drafts exist because…it’s easy content filler and people like to argue about them. HEY GUYS, I THINK JOEY BOSA IS OVERRATED, CHECK OUT MY NEW MOCK DRAFT WHICH HAS HIM FALLING INTO THE TEENS. ARGUE ABOUT THAT WHILE I SIT BACK AND RAKE IN THE PAGEVIEWS. Why do you care what this (insert draft columnist here) thinks? Mock Drafts are guessing games that these guys are essentially playing for fun. Maybe it’s fun to try and pick what player goes where. I can understand the appeal of that once in a while. But these are mock drafts. We get new ones from every columnist pretty much every week. How many big boards does Mel Kiper go through per season? How many different iterations do we get from McShay and everyone else who covers the draft? Enough to make each one pretty much valueless. CHECK OUT MY NEWEST MOCK DRAFT. I CHANGED IT SLIGHTLY FROM LAST WEEK. NOW THIS GUY IS GOING 7th INSTEAD OF 10th! ARGUE ABOUT IT.

Has any mock draft ever actually been right? Just a 1st round picked correctly? Hell, how many of these “experts” even get the top 10 exactly right each year? Pretty much none of them. So why do we care who they think is going to get picked when, exactly? Last year near the draft some guy had Vic Beasley falling out of the first round and everyone went nuts. WHOOOOO CARES. Some people will fall out of the first, it happens all the time. Some make it into the first all the time. Yet this guy was getting dumped on for being stupid, when in reality the stupidity was everyone who gave any sort of value to meaningless content filler like a mock draft.

I find the most valuable draft analysis to be pretty much everything except mock drafts. I love how Mayock does it, releasing his list of top 5 players at every position. I find that kind of information far more interesting. Trying to figure out who are the best players at each spot is an interesting and relevant idea, because it’s likely exactly what the teams themselves are doing. I doubt teams do mock drafts. They probably try to list every player they like and need in some sort of order, and use that list as a guideline during the actual draft. Figuring out who is the best and what players fit what teams is interesting analysis, and far more useful to me as a fan trying to learn who these players are then how some guy “predicts” the draft will go down (and they are rarely right). I’d much rather read an article about who someone thinks the Giants should draft and why, instead of who they think they will get during a guess simulation game.

In the time this article was written the internet created 43 mock drafts.