What’s All This Mockery
It’s almost here!!!
The NFL draft is upon us and 32 teams will draft a handful of new young players to infuse talent and build their rosters with the hope of making their teams competitive and ultimately hoist a Lombardi Trophy in February. For a lot of fans, it’s an exciting time of year. They get to see how many picks out of the 739 mock drafts they did were correct and I promise, if they get even one right they won’t let you forget about it. From season’s end, the frenzy begins and mock drafts flood social media timelines. There are those who love it and those, like myself, who get sick of seeing them after someone’s 17th iteration. So I asked myself, where did this “Mock Draft Mania” come from? When did it start? Who is responsible for this madness?
While you can certainly fire up Google and go down the rabbit hole yourself, I will save you the trouble. Nobody knows the exact origin of the first mock draft but there has been a history of draft analysis over the last 75 years.
The first person to publish a list of prospects was a funeral home director from Pittsburgh by the name of Ray Byrne and that was back in the 1940s. Obviously, back in those times intel would have been difficult with the limited ways of gathering information.
That all started to change in the late 1970s. Joel Buchsbaum of Pro Football Weekly earned respect and praise around the NFL. He’s also viewed as the person who perfected the mock draft. A few years later, Mel Kiper started his rise on ESPN and since1984, although criticized by some, Kiper has been a staple on the network. Everybody remembers the interview of Colts GM Bill Tobin and the iconic quote “who the hell is Mel Kiper”, if you don’t, you should definitely look it up!
In the 90s, other draft analyst joined the fray along with Kiper and Buchsbaum. People were eating up these mock drafts, sports radio were even using them for content material.
Now we get in today’s age of the internet. Information has no end and the NFL has capitalized without much effort. It’s front and center 12 months out of the year. Super Bowl ends and the offseason begins with free agency, combine, draft, rookie minicamp, OTAs, mandatory minicamp then training camp back to back to back. And the pre draft mocks are just another cog in the huge wheel of the NFL.
Mock drafts have become so popular that there are competitions among sports writers and analysts to see who can get the most picks correct but since teams keep their draft board a closely guarded secret, a point system is awarded even if its not the right player. Predict a trade 20 points, right position but wrong player 5 points ect. All that to get crowned the King of the Guess because that’s pretty much they are doing.
I definitely get the allure of mock drafting, especially since the creation of the Mock draft simulator. With the simulators, you can see if there’s a chance a game changing prospect could fall to your team or what it would take for your team to guarantee they get a star pass rusher it needs so badly with the trade options it provides. We all like to put our GM hat on from time to time and with the simulator we get to be just that. But these simulators are not reliable, I’ve seen one with Abdul Carter falling all the way to our pick at 29 and Travis Hunter going to the Steelers at pick 21. So take it with a grain of salt.
Let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment, as fans we don’t know shit about shit. We can say we “study the film” or “watched the tape” but 99.7% of us have no clue what the hell we’re looking at. So as you sit on your lazy boy chair with your GM hat firmly on criticizing others for their dumb decision on taking Joe Blow instead of Joe Schmo in the 2nd round of a mock draft, someone said the same thing about you because as we say on the Bleeding Burgundy Podcast “Fans are stupid” and that’s ok, we are supposed to be. If we knew shit about shit we would have jobs in the NFL, but instead I think I’ll work on Mock Draft 197.6
