Grading the 2023 NFL Mock Drafters

The 2023 NFL Draft promised some chaos, and it mostly delivered. The team that drafted 2nd then traded up to draft 3rd. The second running back was drafted before the second cornerback was. A draft some predicted would have just one WR taken in the 1st had four go in a row. Players seen with a real chance to go top 10 were drafted in the 30s. A record 14 QBs were drafted. A kicker was selected in the 3rd round. Sean Clifford was drafted.

Of course the reason we knew to expect the unexpected was because the mock drafts told us so. The mock drafts told us that there were approximately 40 players that could go in the first round but that no one was really sure that any of them were actually first round talents. They told us that there were QBs who either would get drafted in the top 5 or not in the 1st round at all, and couldn’t agree on who QB2 was or where the unknown QB2 would get drafted. And yet despite all that noise, most mock drafts were fairly accurate.

This year’s mock draft scoring expectedly saw a high median score compared to years past, but with few exceptions were mostly bunched together.

Our scoring system is simple yet punishing. No rewarding people for getting a 1st round pick “right” if they were 20 picks off, like half the mocks we scored did when they had Nolan Smith a top 10 pick. Or calling a mock that had Will Levis 4th overall the most accurate.

For every selection a mock is off, that mock drafter gets a point. So if you mocked Will Levis to the Colts at 4, you got 29 points, while if you mocked Jalen Carter to the Eagles at 10, you received 1 inconsequential point. If you were bold enough to mock a trade and were wrong–and you were almost certainly wrong–you were penalized double the points. This runs the risk of being penalized twice if you are wrong on both players, but then nobody made you mock a trade, you brought this on yourself.

Let’s get to the point, and to the points:

General observations

• The worst two mocks did not have Will Levis.
• Every year there is a player who sneaks into the back of some mock drafts and then when the teams get to call the shots it turns out they’re actually a 4th or 5th rounder. This year’s edition was Adetomiwa Adebawore, who was in 6 mocks but was the 8th pick of the 4th round.
• This year also featured two mocks with 7th rounders, coincidentally taken on back-to-back picks.
• Every year there are two positions that trip up mock drafters: QB and OL. Nearly every year there is at least one QB that gets 1st round buzz who isn’t a 1st rounder, this year was both Will Levis and Hendon Hooker. And there are always an OL who tape grinding amateurs fall in love with but the NFL is not as wild about, and a lineman that the NFL likes more than the tape grinders. This year the most notable was guard O’Cyrus Torrence, who was a popular 1st rounder in mocks but was drafted late in the 2nd and was the fourth guard drafted. Peter Skoronski was seen by many as the top OL in the draft, he was the 3rd OL taken, while Darnell Wright, seen by many as OL4, was the 2nd OL taken.
• Nobody’s top 10 was a combination of the actual top 10.
• Of the actual 31 players to go in the first round the average mock had 25 of them.

The good, the bad, and the ugly

Best mock: Albert Breer. Breer has pretty consistently produced strong mock drafts, showing that he’s very plugged in. Breer prevailed by missing small. Only five other mock drafters had more correct picks, but he led the way with 28 players in his mock actually being drafted in the 1st round, and 18 of his misses were within 10 spots. That was good enough to get him the top spot despite mocking Will Levis to the Texans at 12. If this was golf he would have won with par while the rest of the field was over.

Honorable mention: Only three mocks got the first four players right: Joel Klatt, The Athletic beat writer mock, and… the BGN Community Mock. And of those three, the BGN Community Mock had the lowest score.

Every year I put in the BGN Community Mock to compare to the “experts.” It never does great, but it usually does better than a couple of people who get paid to make mock drafts. (For this reason I always include Mike Florio, who purposely mails it in and more often than not is middle of the pack.) No offense to the participants of our mock, but it should be embarrassing to the professionals to be beaten by it. This year was the best one yet, and really only got a bad score because of Adetomiwa Adebawore, who for a hot minute was getting some first round buzz. This year it did so well I might retire it from competition on the high note of beating so many pros. Well done!

Dishonorable mention, part I: Pete Prisco. A lot of mocks had Will Levis 4th to the Colts, and they weren’t totally wrong. If the Colts had been jumped for Richardson they would have taken Levis, so they were on to how much the Colts liked him. But no one had him 1st overall to the Panthers. Except Pete. This draft gave everyone a single sure fire selection, and he botched it.

Dishonorable mention, part II: Mel Kiper changed his mock the morning of the draft to include information that he had been hearing. Tsk tsk Mel, no gaslighting. His original release was scored.

Worst mock, part I: 33rd Team staff. This may shock you but a mock run by Ryan Grigson’s director of college scouting had some whiffs. Will Levis at 2, Hendon Hooker at 11, Dawand Jones at 17, and Jalin Hyatt at 21 brought this mock crashing down.

Worst mock, part II: Brett Kollman. Shout out to Alex Karklins for bringing this one to our attention. Having the Vikings trade up to 3 for Anthony Richardson was a miniscule cost on points but was part of a larger misunderstanding: he had the Eagles trade down and take Lukas Van Ness and then draft a TE 30th; and he had Dawand Jones, taken 111st, going 24th overall. But what really killed him was mocking Cory Trice to the Giants at 25, Trice went 241st. That gave him more points for that pick than two entire mocks.

Worst mock, part III: Cris Collinsworth. The funny thing about this mock is that most of the picks were actually solid. In addition to his five correct positions, Collinsworth was off by 10 or fewer spots on 12 picks. That’s a respectable performance. What killed his mock was that he had a 4th rounder-Dawand Jones, 11th overall; a 6th rounder-Luke Wypler, 25th overall, and a 7th rounder-Anthony Johnson, 28th overall. He also had, for reasons unknown to man, the Chiefs taking Hendon Hooker with the 31st pick. The Anthony Johnson pick was so bad that PFF gaslit readers by changing the pick in the published mock to Michael Mayer.

That should lead to automatic disqualification but this is more shameful.