The NFL Draft is one of the best events in all of sports.  Its scope, impact, and storylines outshine the drafts in other pro sports and make it a strategist's dream (or nightmare, if you get it wrong).

This diary will explore:

• How the draft works - Not the mechanics of the picks, but rather how and why predictions are so unreliable and how to make a mock draft more realistic.
• Draft strategy - Trades are a huge part of the draft every year and there are reasons to maneuver even when you aren’t sure what player you’re going to get.
• Player tiers - The players I like (and don’t like) segmented into tiers based on when they’re (somewhat) likely to be drafted.
• Favorite Lions picks - Dudes I’d like to see in Honolulu Blue this fall.
• Michigan’s draft hopefuls - From JJ McCarthy to Karsen Barnhart, who will get drafted, when, and who might get left out.

Part I: How the NFL Draft Works (and Doesn’t Work)

TL; DR - The NFL and everyone analyzing it are not good at predicting draft outcomes, both in terms of how the draft will actually go and how good players will become.

Billions of dollars are poured into NFL draft research.  Analytics, scouting, investigation–all 32 teams expend massive resources across multiple disciplines to build a draft board that will–more than any other single factor–dictate the success or failure of their franchise.

But the NFL is still pretty terrible at it.

There are lots of reasons for this: the college game is very different from the NFL; the professional football environment is very different from college; player development is an inexact science at best; injuries; luck…the end result is that very few impact players come out of each draft, and often NOT from the highest rounds.

About 30% of the NFL’s starters come from round one.  That’s pretty good!  But the drop-off is severe: 17.5% come from round two, 12.6% from round three, and 10.8% from round four.  Rounds 5-7 produce a total of just 15.5% of the league’s starters.  While that trendline might seem reasonable, it also leaves 13.6% of NFL starters out–the undrafted free agents (UDFAs).

This means that UDFAs comprise more of the league’s starters than players from any round after the second.  This does NOT mean that a UDFA is more likely than a 3rd-rounder to become a starter–around 480 UDFAs are signed every year (vs. about 35 picks in round 3)--but it does illustrate how many good players the league misses in its evaluations and how many bad players the league likes in its evaluations.

Put another way: about 31% of first-round picks sign a second contract with the team that drafted them.  Even when you factor in trades, less than half sign with the team they’re on when it comes time to get that all-important second contract.

All of this is a pretty long way of saying that, after the very early part of the draft, predictions on where prospects will be picked tend to be pretty bad, even using the consensus board (which is still a better predictor of success than most metrics).

This means that making a mock draft “realistic” is something of an exercise in futility.  In the 2023 draft alone, one top-10 player wasn’t drafted in round one, and four more in the top 32 didn't make the first-round cut.  Interestingly, all of these players appear to be on track to out-perform their round two draft position (more on this draft theory later).

So, rather than attempting to build a mock draft or big board, the next part of this diary will discuss draft strategy based on this year’s pool of prospects (which is special for a few reasons) and discuss the tier system that is closer to what the NFL uses than the draft boards we see on websites.  It will also discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the draft by position, before part three lays out the prospects I like and when I think they ought to be drafted (or signed).  Part four will share my favorite Lions picks and the strategy that will help make this another great draft for Detroit, and part five will make some final predictions about Michigan prospects and whether or not this class of Wolverines will set the draft record.