Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Mock draft review: Right players, wrong teams
Arnette to Raiders among surprises in opening round
Everything was fine until the Giants decided to hold onto their pick.
The first three picks fell as we, and many mock drafters, expected. Joe Burrow to Cincinnati, Chase Young to Washington and Jeff Okudah to Detroit, the biggest question mark of the top three.
Could it be? Is our first annual mock draft going to be the gold standard by which all other mocks are measured?
Of course not. Our prediction of the Giants trading down out of the four spot to allow Jacksonville to jump ahead of Miami and take Tua Tagovailoa didn’t come true, and it all fell apart.
The Giants selected tackle Andrew Thomas, who we had going No. 5 to Miami, leaving the Dolphins to take Tagovailoa.
It got real ugly from there. While 25 of the 32 players selected in the first round were projected in our mock, only five went to the proper team.
■ Final Grade: LOL.
■ Best prediction: Texas Christian cornerback Jeff Gladney to the Vikings. After the consensus top two corners, Jeff Okudah and C.J. Henderson, were off the board in the top 10, the order in which the rest of the deep group at the position would come off the board was a total mystery. Gladney made a lot of sense for the Vikings as he filled a need and fits the system.
Our final mock had Minnesota taking receiver Jalen Reagor and Gladney with their two first-round picks. Instead, they paired Gladney with wide receiver Justin Jefferson. They even took Gladney after trading down, so they picked up an extra pick and still got the player they wanted. The Vikings had a very good opening round.
■ Worst prediction: There are plenty of candidates here, but we’ll go with picking Baylor wide receiver Denzel Mims to go to the Broncos with the 20th pick in the first round.
He went late in the second round with the 59th pick to the Jets. Also, tackle Josh Jones going No. 30 to Green Bay. He fell all the way to the third round.
■ Biggest surprise: The Raiders stunned the entire mock draft world by selecting Damon Arnette at No.
19. There were about six corners we considered choosing for the Raiders at that spot, and Arnette was never in the conversation.
In the end, the determination was that none of them were deserving of being selected that high. So we passed on the position of need even after trading down to No. 24 where safety Xavier McKinney was the selection.
There are many mock drafts online and all vary drastically, but we couldn’t find one with Arnette in the first round. That doesn’t mean the Raiders were wrong in their analysis, just that the conventional wisdom means nothing to them.
■ Biggest regret: Too many trades. Our first four mock drafts featured zero trades and actually ended up being closer to accurate than the final one. Trades are always going to happen, but they are nearly impossible to predict, and once you miss on one it throws off the entire flow of the mock draft.
It’s like picking a massive upset in your NCAA Tournament bracket that doesn’t come to fruition and impacts every subsequent round.
■ Lessons learned: Don’t overthink it. Oregon QB Justin Herbert to the Chargers felt like an obvious choice throughout the process and that was the pick in several of our earlier versions. There was plenty of noise and smokescreens that the Chargers and other teams had soured on him due to inconsistency and that he could potentially tumble down the draft board.
That was never going to happen. Sometimes the most obvious scenarios are the right ones. This is our first year fully going through this process, and sometimes you read too many interviews and watch too much film.
When you finally decide to make a drastic move in your mock draft at 4 a.m. less than 48 hours before the draft because you watch three straight off-target throws in a September game from two years ago despite three months of research, it’s probably the wrong choice.