2014 NFL Mock Draft Grades: Scoring the Experts

The 2014 NFL draft was last week and already mock draft season has started again. Everyone who made a mock draft will continue about their job without any accountability because all that matters is that you read it. (By the way, thanks for reading this.) Predicting the draft is difficult, and predicting trades is near impossible. So mock drafts are by default inaccurate. But just how inaccurate? What constitutes a "good" mock draft? The Huddle Report attempts to score mock rafts, but their method is too simplistic. They simply give mock drafters a point if they correctly predicted a player would go in the first round and two points if they got the right team. There is no real accountability in this system, predicting Teddy Bridgewater to go #3 to the Jaguars results in the same score as predicting him to go to the Browns at #26, both cases get one point even though the latter more accurately predicted he would not be an early pick. That is not accountability, that is giving everyone a trophy for participating.

Here at BGN you know we love mock drafts, and we can do better than The Huddle Report. This system is also very simple but also a much harsher scorer: the number of picks between where the player was mocked and where he actually went is the score. If a player was taken with a different pick but to the correct team, whether it be by trade or by a team’s other pick later in that round, that difference is halved. The mock drafter should be penalized for misjudging a player's draft value but rewarded for recognizing the team's significant interest in the player. So if someone mocked Johnny Manziel to Cleveland 4th overall, they only get 11 points instead of 22. However if they mocked him say, going #2 in a trade, they get double the points. The lower the points, the better you did.

Results

Congratulations BGN commenters, you finished 6th! SleepingDuck was the only person to make an accurate pick, mocking Khalil Mack to the Raiders. The best scoring mock drafter was Chris Burke, and he only got two picks exactly right. On a curve, SB Nation's Dan Kadar was more accurate, he had six correct picks and finished a close second in total scoring. The least accurate was Doug Farrar, who along with Burke co-authors SI.com’s Audibles. That co-workers are on the opposite ends of the spectrum and, no offense, that 32 commenters did better than paid professionals are a glorious illustration that mock drafts are a waste of time. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be reading their 2015 mock draft.