A Word on Mock Drafts

The NFL is cursed with a ridiculously long off-season. Well, perhaps not cursed. It's kind of their fault, but there's really not much they could do about it, short of scheduling more bye weeks or more games or dragging the season out to make it last longer somehow. The point is, between the Super Bowl and the next meaningful game, there are about seven months of virtual inactivity.

So with so much dead time, all the NFL writers hoping to remain gainfully employed need to figure out something to talk about, leading to near endless speculation about free agency, depth charts, uniforms, and, perhaps more than anything else, the NFL Draft.

While I like the draft as much as anybody, I get so very sick of every writer on the planet covering the draft. Given the washout rate on draft picks, it's pretty clear even NFL personnel folks (who, you know, draft people for a living) don't have a real good idea what's going on when the draft rolls around. But does that stop everybody from trying to predict who's going where.

And to a certain extent, I get it. It's fun trying to solve the puzzle of who is going to be good and who's not and where they'll all end up. That's why we watch the draft right?

But we need to stop pretending like mock drafts are significant or that they indicate any actual movement by teams. For example, last week I saw this tweet by NFL.com writer David Jeremiah:

https://twitter.com/MoveTheSticks/status/307549157709709312

STOP THE PRESSES. Daniel says Luke Joeckel is BACK ON TOP everybody! This changes...well, nothing really. It's a mock draft, after all.

Obviously I'm picking on Daiel Jeremiah a bit. Everybody does this, and obviously people read them otherwise they wouldn't get written. But can we just stop pretending they actually reflect anything meaningful? Let's just have fun, alright?

Oh, and I'll have the latest mock draft digest up tomorrow. If you can't beat 'em...