Mock Draft

Its draft week in the Steel City! I strongly considered swinging up this weekend, but ultimately I decided I don’t like crowds. If the Steelers ever have a top 5 pick, I’d consider travelling for the draft, but while we toil with the worst possible draft position for teams without playoff wins, I won’t make the effort. The NFL has also shortened the first round of the draft this year limiting teams to eight minutes per pick instead of ten. I will now be 20% less mad at the Raiders for taking the full clock before announcing Mendoza.

We’ve been curating our NFL first round Mock Drafts for over 5 years now (first in 2021). If you haven’t yet, please fill one out here real quick. At least copy over someone else’s. Lets take a look at how we’ve done with our predictions. Our mock drafts are scored as follows: 2 points for correctly guessing the player a team drafts and 0.5 points for guessing the correct position.

Group Performance

As a group, we average just under 12 player to team combinations per year which is pretty solid. That’s strongly inflated by our reads of the first 10 picks where we average 7 correct picks. That’s much higher than I would have expected, but with about four to seven people making predictions every year maybe the math checks out. Additionally, the media coverage on teams’ targets in the first few picks is subject to less smoke screens and misinformation as those teams probably don’t care about getting snaked since it would take a king’s ransom to trade into the top 10.

Guessing Prowess

Jeff, both Codys, and me are the only ones with >3 years worth of predictions. Across the past five years, we all have similar scores and are at the mercy of the predictability of the draft. For example, in 2024 we all scored more than 18 points, but none of us cracked 12 the year prior.

Talent Scouting

The success of a first round NFL draft pick is not a binary positive or negative outcome. You can count the number of Pro Bowls a player attends, but that’s quickly becoming a joke accolade. All-Pros could be useful, but plenty of contributing players aren’t selected to an All-Pro team. Signing a second contract with the team that drafted you is a commonly used metric to measure pick success. Its not without its exceptions (eg Rashod Bateman) or ommissions (eg Micah Parsons), but that’s the metric I decided to look at. Importantly, we were predicting what players teams will draft and not should draft so this metric is slightly different than what we were going for.

After constructing the previous paragraph, I then checked and saw 13 of the 32 first round picks from 2021 signed a second contract with the team that drafted them. Interestingly, three of us had all 13 drafted, and the worst was still 11. That makes enough sense when you consider we all consistenly have the same ~25 players taken in the first round every year. Also, 10 of the 13 players re-signed were drafted in the top half of the first round.

Most of the 2022 draft class hasn’t had to sign an extension yet, so we judged them whether or not any team picked up their fifth year option. 20 of 32 players had their options picked up. For similar reasons, we all had between 16 and 18 of those players selected in the first round.

Finally, I considered correlating our predicted draft positions with the players’ actual positions, but some of y’all just wrote “Johnson” like I’m supposed to know who the hell that is five years later.

Dem Stillers

Again, the point of our mock drafts is to get picks right, not pick the best players first. Regardless, lets consider who we’ve all predicted the Steelers selecting the last five years. 2021 was the Najee year, but a few of us held out hope we would draft Landon Dickerson (G) instead. I’d call Najee a successful draft pick overall (especially with the Steelers’ track record), but Dickerson would have been a much better pick. Shoutout to Cody who picked Alex Leatherwood who started two seasons, then was cut by the Raiders. In 2022 the Steelers drafted Kenny Pickett. We all had the Steelers taking a QB, but Emily went with Malik Willis while I opted for Desmond Ridder. In 2023 we traded up for Broderick Jones. Most of us had Darnell Wright falling, though he was drafted by the Bears at #10, or Joey Porter Jr. who we selected in the second round. In 2024, three of us wanted Amarius Mims (OT) who was drafted two spots ahead of the Steelers’ pick by the Bengals at 18. The rest of us wanted Brian Thomas Jr. who I would be would not have broken out in 2024 with Justin Fields at the helm. Last year, Jeff and Dave guessed Shedeur Sanders while I wanted Egbuka. I feel this year is really a best player available kind of year.

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