Every spring we football fans sit and twiddle our thumbs waiting with bated anticipation for late April, when we welcome the new class of professional players to join the new ranks wearing our favorite team’s colors. In the meantime mock drafts and prospect rankings are all we have to cull the pent up impatience accumulating since the Super Bowl. While the draft experts do their best to weed out the fact from the fiction, the rumors from reality, matching the mock drafts to the real deal are never an exact science.
Trades, surprise picks and new information always seem to skew the results. As of this week, some minor adjustments and changes aside, almost all mock drafts look the same — not mine. Including some trades and some surprises, here is my one and only first-round mock draft. I have only included draft picks in the trade scenarios because player evaluations in trades can get messy. It’s fun, it’s different and it might be a lot closer to what we’ll see on Thursday than you think.
Mandatory Credit: Douglas DeFelice-USA TODAY Sports
