Four decades ago, one would have to wait a while for a prediction of the NFL Draft. A Mock Draft. Sports Illustrated had a Mock Draft. So did The Sporting News and Pro Football Weekly. That was about it. All of them came out about a week before the draft. You had to wait. Now you can find a Mock Draft for the 2015 NFL Draft. 2015!? We don't even know who will be in the 2015 NFL Draft. In the 1970s there was no televised draft. There was no draft coverage. Even Mel Kiper Jr. was a few years away. The handful of mock drafts available were often our first introduction to how NFL teams might view some of the college football players. They actually served a purpose then. They definitely did for me. Mock drafts serve absolutely no purpose now. But, they sure are fun.
Fun. The fact that mocks are fun gives them license to be so damn annoying. The problem lies in that some fans take them for fact. Fans see that a player is slotted by some, often, anonymous person to be taken by a team at 24. That leads to other anonymous people to slot that player at that spot. Suddenly we have a concrete ranking for that player. Yet none of it has any basis in reality. Every single person that reports on the draft and every single person that follows the draft has an opinion on these NFL prospects. The opinions of those that follow the draft are often formed by those that cover the draft. Opinions. Everyone has them. Fans and supposed experts fall in love with certain prospects and that skews their rankings of all of the prospects. The funny thing about all of these rankings and ratings that we see and honor don't even matter. Each of the 32 NFL teams have their own. Each of those is different. These 32 different rankings determine the draft. The real draft. People are shocked when the real draft doesn't match an accepted mock draft. They'll say that a team reached for a player if a mock called for that player to be drafted several picks, or even a round, later. Sometimes the draft that matters most is the one that's most questioned. It's a mockery.
The craziest thing about mock drafts is the incredible number of them. There were a few in the 1970s and even into the 1980s. Without the internet you had to wait for the print edition of a magazine to arrive in your mailbox or at a store. It was a long wait. Not nearly as long as the wait for this year's draft but it was a very long wait. Now there are thousands, millions. Everyone has one, maybe two, often five. Hell, I've done about a dozen. I just can't stop. The real problem with mock drafts is that they are so damn fun. It's just a mistake to put any real weight in any of them. Especially those that are done two years in advance. That's a real mockery. Some mock drafts might carry more weight. I value the opinion of NFL Network's Mike Mayock so I look forward to the mock that he eventually does. Even Mayock's mock is rarely very accurate. His, like most, come off the rails before the real draft even leaves the top-10. There's just too many variables and opinions.
The extra two week wait for the draft is already unbearable. With two more weeks, mocks may cease being fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment