2024 Off-Season Mock Drafts: Impact of Potential Landing Spots

For this edition of the Off-Season Mock Draft series, I wanted to look at some NFL mock drafts and see if I could find some commonalities between them. After laying out the potential landing spots, I tried to think about how those potential landing spots could impact various players' fantasy values. I used a recent mock draft from Pro Football Network as well as an older mock draft. I also looked at a mock from drafttek.com and another from DLF's Shane Hallam with draftcountdown.com. After doing this exercise in the past, I found this year's mock drafts to be wildly different from one another, with minimal consensus after the top-four picks, so let's get into it.

Quarterbacks

Caleb Williams, QB

More often than not, Williams is mocked to the Bears at 1.01. I hate it. The Bears have a long history of failure when it comes to drafting and developing quarterbacks in the NFL. With the Packers and Lions taking a step forward this year, and the Vikings only being a couple of injuries away from squeezing into the playoffs themselves, the Bears are on the outside looking in at the playoffs in 2024- even with Williams at the helm, likely resulting in the firing of head coach Matt Eberflus.

This would mean Williams will enter his second season with a new coach and his second offensive scheme in two years, and that is often a recipe for disaster. Look, I can't see anything bumping Williams from his perch atop the superflex hierarchy, but I am overwhelmingly concerned about this most likely of landing spots. In the single mock Williams didn't go 1.01, the Bears took Marvin Harrison Jr, but we'll get into that a little later.

Drake Maye, QB

According to the mocks, UNC Tar Heel Drake Maye will land in Washington to take over for UNC Tar Heel Sam Howell. As their rosters stand today, I like the collective receiving corps of Washington more than I do Chicago, and following the draft, I can imagine a world where I end up bumping Maye over Willimas in my rankings. Now, with the recent hiring of head coach Dan Quinn, we have to hope he brings in a strong offensive coordinator and that Maye is his own man, and not like the previous recent UNC signal-callers we've seen in the NFL.

Jayden Daniels, QB