A Draft Boy Invents Time Travel
I’ve seen a bunch of draft people complaining that this year has been one of the hardest years they can remember to make a mock draft. No QBs really puts the entire top of the order in a mess because normally you can just mock the top 2-3 QBs in the top 10-15 picks to the most likely teams and all the other top talent starts to fit neatly into place. Without those QBs, the boards seem all over the place and nobody seems to agree on a consensus top few choices. It reminds me of 2013, which was also a dumb draft with no QBs. Go back and look at that top 10. Woof.
Of course, my retort to this, as always, is who gives a fuck. Putting together a mock draft is so meaningless. Whatever value it adds via discussion or even team analysis is so small, especially when draft writers make about 100 versions each. No mock draft is ever much more than around 15% accurate at the end of the day. Their primary existence is as content filler.
I will not win this fight but I shall continue my crusade to tell people to stop giving a shit about mock drafts. They are speculative discussion points at best and clickbait designed to make you mad at worst. I am once again asking draft writers to stop spending so much time moving names up and down an ordered list as if it has much relevance and put more effort into ranking prospects at their positions and how they may fit on relative teams. Give me more deep analysis of prospects. Give me more lists of what teams best fit a prospects skills. Stop trying to guess who the top pick is, because none of us have any real power here.
And YOU, person reading this, who patrols sports sites every day while procrastinating at work, stop clicking on them. The clicks give them more power. The less you click on them, the fewer shall be made, giving the ones that are more importance, meaning that the writer has to put more genuine thought and effort into each one, raising the value. We can do it. We can end mass Mock Draft overload in our lifetime.
I will be taking next week to work exclusively on the draft cards so don’t expect a comic on Mon/Wed unless some real shit goes down, but be sure to stop by my twitter on Thursday night for some doodles and Friday for the pics
I’d have used it to turn in perfect March Madness brackets for years, so people finally shut the hell up about it.
And win a ton of money in the process, everyone’s a winner!
Mock drafts can be fun. Mocking more than the first 2-3 rounds is pointless for me, because I don’t know 95% of the prospects at that point, but still. It’s all speculation and it’s a solid launchpad for conversations about team needs and team building strategies.
The true enemy of the people remains now, as it ever was: Power Rankings. It’s all just a list of teams approximately ranked by win-loss records. They’re all the same list! And the conversation around them is joyless. You either agree that your team is good/bad/middling, or people moan about how their team isn’t getting enough respect.
I completely agree with you on top of being the most useless thing on the planet, they also always are so obvious, we know who the best teams are and we know the worst teams are and nobody gives a damn who is in the middle spots. It’s also the same with player rankings, all they do is spark needless debates on whos better than who while pointing the obvious.
I agree 100%. Power Rankings are absolutely useless. They’re just basic opinions of every team’s season put into a list format. I think they’re more tolerable than Mock Drafts though simply because they happen during the season so they’re a lot easier to phase out. Mock Drafts basically take up the entire offseason post-February and, outside of free agency, provide basically all of the content we get until the draft hits. Just a sad time to be alive.
Drafts do dominate the offseason news cycle too much. I get why Dave or anyone is just tired of them because of that. I also have no use for it when people want to start mocking for a draft any sooner than February. Those guys who want to talk about next year’s mock the second this year’s mock ends? They know who they are. And they’re monsters. MONSTERS!
People that immediately throw together early Mocks for the next year’s draft deserve the guillotine.
I will admit that if there is one good thing about this time of year, it’s that it forced me to get into other sports. I used to be miserable around this point but now I can at least enjoy the NHL and NBA Playoffs. Well, at least until the Bruins and Celtics find a way to fold again. Still better than Mock Draft season though.
As dumb as Mock Drafts are, they do give us a more insight on the prospects in the class, so theyŕe not completely useless.
As a Texans fan, I hope we trade our 3rd overall pick and pick a Defensive player at the 13th Overall Pick. It looks like the class will be defensive heavy this year so there should be plenty of good options at the pick, I don’t think any prospect is worth that 3rd overall pick, and if the Davis Mills Experiment fails, we could have multiple top 5 picks in 2023.
I said all of this in a football group chat the other day and got called a buzzkill haha. I’ll keep trying to spread the word though!
But if Getting Pollard’d didn’t end him what makes you think a Tanya Hardinging will do the trick?
I could easily imagine someone creating some revolutionary, life-changing technology surely for the benefits of Draft Prognostication.
Time Machine = To See History? Learn from Our Mistakes? Set Right What Once Went Wrong? Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come? Nope, looking ahead for upcoming draft.
Food and Exercise Pill = Solve World Hunger? Elevate the 3rd World Countries? Nope, cornering the market to ensure my picks are selected.
Mass Hypnosis Machine = Reform criminals and complete monsters? World Domination? Nope, brainwashing GMs to ensure my picks are selected.
you forgot “killing hitler” on your time machine layout but otherwise yes 100% agree with all this
Actually from February to August this here web comic is pretty much the only NFL I do.
Same. I have MLS starting fairly soon after the end of NFL so I get my sports fix there instead of worrying about the draft.
Poor Brett Kollmann.
I find post-draft day reviews to be more interesting since we can laugh with the hindsight being had. I would have liked to have seen the reviews for the 1993 draft day.
I made a weird observation when looking through that 2013 draft. The 3rd rounders actually have more players (13) still on a roster than rounds 1 and 2 who have 12 each. Neat.
As for Mock drafts I enjoy them immediately proceeding the draft as like a competition between analyst but even then I’m eh. The Ringer has the best version because it is a mock draft combined with a big board and scheme fits for each team. That should be the standard, make the journalist say this team would like this player for X reason. I hate the nonsense like I’m going to fabricate a trade for Green Bay to pick up a project QB instead of a player they actually need, like that would ever actually happen.
Ah yes the infamous 2013 draft, or as us german NFL fans like to call it the Björn Werner draft *shudder*
Fun fact: Exactly half of the picks in the first round that year were either O or D-line men and while there were a couple of solid starters in there only 3 all pro selections amongst all of them….
First round: EJ Manuel, #16
Second Round: Geno Smith, #7 (#39 overall)
Third Round: Mike Glennon, #11 (#73 overall)
Wow. I remember that draft being QB-deficient, but that’s that’s it for QB picks in the first 3 rounds. And there were several taken in the 4th round, and then none until the 7th round. Yeesh.
Just because of the name, I thought this was a Brett Kollman knock.