2010 Mock Draft Results in Review

If there's one thing that the number of mock drafts produced every year has proven, it's that drafts are impossible to predict. I'm fairly certain the biggest reason for this is that nearly mocks assume teams won't trade - which is absurd, because there are multiple trades in the first round every year. Another big reason is that guys like Mel Kiper have no idea what they're talking about in evaluating players, and I'm still not certain as to why his opinion should be given any more weight than, say, my dog.

Ok, he probably watches more college football than my dog, but my dog wouldn't have called Jimmy Clausen the fourth best prospect in the draft this year either.

So who did the best? I rounded up sixteen mock drafts, from the following analysts:

• ESPN's NFL Network of bloggers
• ESPN's Todd McShay
• ESPN's Mel Kiper
• ESPN's Bill Simmons
• The Sporting News
• SI.com's Peter King
• SI.com's Don Banks
• NFL.com's Pat Kirwan
• The National Football Post
• CBS Sports's Rob Rang, Chad Reuter, Pete Prisco, and Clark Judge (no link because they obliterated their mock drafts once the actual draft happened...good job covering up the tracks, guys)
• Yahoo's Shutdown Corner blog
• Walter Football
• Philly.com's Paul Domowitch

Take from these results what you will, but I'll admit my grading system is a bit skewed as it heavily weights correctly picking whether players will go in the first round at all. It's difficult to do it any other way because the easiest thing would be to measure the difference between where a player actually went and where an analyst picked him to go - but if an analyst didn't have a player in their mock at all, it's not possible to do that.

Of course, there are a number of ways to measure who did the best. Let's start by going over the main driver in calculations - who had the most players correctly going in the first round, who they missed, and who they had going in the first round instead:

1. Peter King - 4 (Tyson Alualu, Kareem Jackson, Jerry Hughes, Patrick Robinson), had  Sergio Kindle, Jimmy Clausen, Taylor Mays, and Rodger Saffold
2. Don Banks - 4 (Alualu, Tim Tebow, Jahvid Best, Robinson), had Kindle, Charles Brown, Clausen, Everson Griffen
3. Paul Domowitch - 4 (Alualu, Tebow, Best, Hughes), had Kindle, Brown, Clausen, Mays