Do Not Mourn the Passing of the NFL Mock Draft

The mock draft is dead, killed by the very same people who once loved it so much.

Once the exclusive domain of NFL scouts, TV analysts, magazine staffs, and beat writers, mock drafts became the lingua franca of football in the 2000s, thanks in large part to the internet. With a newfound wealth of draft information at their fingertips, millions of regular fans, after decades with nothing to go on but Mel's Big Board, turned into draftniks, and thousands of draftniks turned into obsessive mock drafters. Today, blogs work on collaborative mocks, analysts and enthusiasts team up for Twitter mocks, and beneath every football article on the internet, commenters post mock drafts in lieu of comments.

"There is definitely overkill," Jeff Risdon told VICE Sports. "We've long since passed the saturation point." Risdon, a lead writer and analyst for RealGM.com and DraftBreakdown.com, witnessed the rise of the mock firsthand.

"When I first started them about 12 years ago, it was rare to see more than one round. Some folks stretched to two, but it was pretty uncommon," he said. "I recall doing a three-rounder in 2008 and my editor complaining it was too long, nobody would read that much."

Now almost everyone who writes about NFL football is compelled to publish at least one first-round or single-team full-draft mock every year, with pro draft analysts and team beat writers churning them out non-stop. The burgeoning draft-industrial complex has even made full-league seven-round mocks—an enormous undertaking of dubious value—commonplace.

"It almost seems like there are separate cultures out there," Risdon said. "Those of us who get paid to cover the NFL and the Draft tend to see [mock drafts] as a necessary evil to get clicks or attention, whereas the amateurs and casual fans read so much more importance into them." Risdon expressed a common frustration: a quickly tossed-off mock may pull ten times the eyeballs of a rigorous article days in the making. But, he's observed, "the gap is closing."

According to Google Trends, the popularity of "mock draft" searches has declined every single year since 2012. It's down 38 percent from its all-time high in April 2006:

Readers and writers alike are slowly realizing that the noise of poorly researched mocks is drowning out more informative signals.

You need plenty of expertise to predict the first round with any meaningful accuracy: in prospect evaluation, in the roster-construction and drafting philosophies of all 32 NFL teams, in finding out who teams actually plan to draft. Almost no one qualifies as an authority in all three areas, though, and even a perfectly accurate mock draft doesn't tell readers everything they want to know.

As such, mocks have bifurcated into "what I think teams will do" and "what I think teams should do" editions, usually posted within days of each other. Each can come in with-trades and no-trades flavors, and the media cycle compels the mocker to constantly update them all as outsider expectations adjust to insider reality.

But mocks don't just change in response to news; they change in response to each other. This January, for example, before draft media and NFL decision-makers had a chance to compare notes at the 2016 Senior Bowl, ESPN's Todd McShay made headlines when he slipped Carson Wentz into the bottom of the first round. Shortly after the NFL world gathered in Mobile, Alabama, Wentz alighted in the top few picks of every subsequent mock draft.

"Every time Daniel Jeremiah or Todd McShay says something new on a podcast or makes an unprecedented choice in their mock," Risdon said, "the reaction is swift and radical." The internet moves fast, but it also breaks things, and rapid iteration of mock drafts causes as many problems as it solves.

"It gives the impression more people know more about what is actually going to happen," Risdon said, "which is quite obviously a false impression."

Taking an especially bold stance on an individual player makes the author stand out, and sometimes it can feel as if that's the whole point. Innovative or intriguing picks ripple throughout the mockiverse, while démodé picks are held up for mockery. Projections that would have been laughable weeks ago become interesting just for being different from the ossified consensus. It's a strange hothouse discourse unto itself.

In the final days before the draft, the mock draft ouroboros devours itself so quickly that obsessive mockers swallow their own head. Look at this fan-vote mock hosted by ESPN:

The final results of our NFL Nation Mock Draft. — NFL on ESPN (@ESPNNFL)April 27, 2016

Ronnie Stanley goes just one pick after presumptive best overall player Laremy Tunsil—and those picks are Nos. 6 and 7! Joey Bosa, thought of as a top-five lock for almost two years, nearly falls out of the top 10! Paxton Lynch is there for the quarterback-hungry Buffalo Bills at No. 19 and they pass on him!

But no matter how hot the fever dreams get—remember when guard David DeCastro was "a virtual lock" to go no lower than No. 13 overall, and went 24th?—mockers are always surprised when the real decision-makers turn their cards in. A million Tweeters could have mocked the 2013 draft for a million years and never projected the Buffalo Bills taking E.J. Manuel at No. 16 overall:

That's why there's a hard ceiling on the usefulness of any mock, and one that's lower than most believe. NFL teams neither participate in, nor pay (much) attention to, our months-long national conversation. The consensus of the mock draft community—from full-time draft analysts at major media outlets to the lesser denizens of #DraftTwitter—bears no real relation to any of the 32 individual draft boards compiled by NFL teams. How valuable can an accurate mock draft be, when history tells us half these teams are about to spend their first-round pick on a guy who can't play?

A player's selection isn't indicative of his "true" value; just because the Denver Broncos took Tim Tebow in the first round doesn't mean 31 other teams didn't have a third-round grade on him. Likewise, just because Teddy Bridgewater was drafted well after Blake Bortles and Johnny Manziel doesn't mean he was a worse NFL prospect, as Bleacher Report's Matt Miller famously maintained throughout the evaluation cycle.

The young generation of draft experts and enthusiasts—people like Risdon, Miller, Rob Engle and Bryan Perez of DraftBreakdown.com, Marcus Armstrong at MockDraftable.com, Zach Whitman of 3sigmaathlete.com among countless others—now provide cutting-edge analysis and data that go far beyond mocks. "Savvier readers are catching on," Risdon said, "and realizing that maybe they should be paying more attention to rankings and scouting opinions instead of conjecture about projections."

Let's be glad for that. The football world is better off without thousands of Internet jabronis referring to "my board" as if they've personally scouted hundreds of prospects. It's better off without hundreds of sportswriters forsaking research, reporting, and writing to figure out some wrinkle that will make their next obligatory mock draft garner a few more clicks. It's certainly far better off for taking the focus away from the play-money value of "reaches" and "steals" and putting it back on the players and teams that will actually play football in the fall.

The era of obsessive mock drafts informed plenty of fans, writers, and even NFL executives—but we'll be even smarter now that it's over.