One of my favorite parts of writing the Off-Season Mock Draft series is getting to know the incoming rookie class better. I don’t watch much college football, so aside from only the biggest-name prospects, I rarely know any incoming rookies this early in the process. Although we aren’t in full-blown rookie draft season yet, it’s never too early to dip your toes in and start getting familiar with their names.
In this edition, I looked at three seven-round NFL mock drafts to see who was projected to what teams and approximately when they were being taken in the draft. The mocks I used were ProFootballNetwork’s from January 20th, drafttek.com’s mock, also from January 20th, and College Football Network’s December 21st mock draft. I’ll look at the incoming prospects by position and discuss their average draft position to get an idea of where they projected ahead of the combine, Pro Days, and NFL draft.
Brief disclaimer: As I mentioned, I don’t follow college football closely, so I certainly do not follow all of the transfer portal news, and who is declaring early for the draft or returning for another season. If I mention the name of someone returning to school or omit an underclassman who recently declared for the draft, my apologies. 100% of my information for this article is coming from the mock drafts I cited. One draft had former Georgia quarterback Carson Beck as a fifth-round pick, and I just discovered he’s transferring to Miami instead, despite declaring for the NFL draft on December 28th. I’m only as good as the information I have available at the time of my writing, so bear with me if something is a little off.
Quarterback
All the mocks have Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders and Miami’s Cam Ward as the top signal callers coming off the board at the top of the draft. In this edition, I’m not going to dig into the landing spots (spoiler alert, that’s coming in a future article), just their rough average draft position to get an idea of what kind of draft capital we might be looking at. In superflex leagues, we will probably see both of them in the top five in rookie drafts. I don’t know if either one will be the 1.01 because of other players we’ll discuss shortly, but they are the clear 1-2 in this year’s draft.
