In 2024, the consensus mock draft at NFL Mock Draft Database correctly projected the first four picks in the draft, along with some key later selections. In 2025, the top six picks were accurately projected by the consensus mock draft. We usually have a good idea what’s going to happen early in the first round before chaos gradually settles in.

In 2026, the consensus mock draft hit the free bingo space — Fernando Mendoza to the Raiders — and that was it. Only three of the mock’s picks hit in the first round, and the two correct non-Mendoza picks targeted specific team needs: guard Vega Ioane going to the Ravens at 14th overall, and running back Jadarian Price going to the Seahawks at 32nd.

In the Top 5, the Titans and Giants vehemently defied the mocks and selected players who were not even among their top-five most-mocked players, per Grinding the Mocks: Carnell Tate at #4 and Arvell Reese at #5, respectively. Those picks were unexpected for polar opposite reasons. Nobody thought the Titans would reach for Tate, and nobody thought four teams would pass on Reese.

I scrolled back through the last 500 mock drafts posted in the NFL Mock Draft Database. Only four of them had Miami’s Rueben Bain falling to #15 or lower, but that’s where the All-American edge rusher was selected by the Buccaneers.

Eight of the 32 first-round picks were at least 10 slots off from where they were projected on Arif Hasan’s consensus big board. Ten slots is a lot! And that’s a quarter of the players!

Ahead of the draft, debate centered on whether the Titans could justify taking Love at #4. Turns out, he got drafted even higher by a team with even less infrastructure to support a star running back.

I don’t want to restart The Running Back Value Wars. We lost too many brave bloggers. But allow me to offer a reasonable take that I think all football minds can agree on: While an exceptional running back can be a very valuable player, that value is reliant on a good offensive line.

When a team with a bad offensive line drafts a great running back, it is throwing talent in the trash. We saw this last year, when the Raiders drafted Ashton Jeanty sixth overall and put him behind one of the worst offensive lines in football, resulting in the 44th-best yards per carry in the NFL.

The Cardinals have a terrible offensive line, ranked 26th in the NFL last year by Pro Football Focus. If anything, offensive line was the position of need for the Cardinals. Instead, they drafted a player who will need a proper (and currently non-existent in Arizona) offensive line to thrive.

Under the NFL’s rookie contract system, Love will receive $53.9 million guaranteed by virtue of being the third overall pick. That is most guaranteed money ever given to a running back.

The NFL Draft is supposed to be an opportunity to find value — like drafting a quarterback, edge rusher, or wide receiver and paying them tens of millions less than an equivalent star veteran at that position. Instead, the Cardinals are paying Love like he’s one of the league’s best backs without ever having seen him play in the NFL.

Look, I’m not a quarterback evaluator, and I’ve been burned in the past when I’ve dabbled in QB evaluation. So I’m not going to do that. BUT! In order to succeed at the NFL level, Simpson would need be an outlier in a couple of important, objective metrics.

First, Simpson is extremely inexperienced, having started just 15 games at Alabama. Prior to Simpson, only three quarterbacks with 15 or fewer starts had been taken in the first round in the last decade, and they were all busts. If we expand the criteria — up to 20 starts, and going back to the start of the century — the results are still really bleak. (Cam Newton is on the list, but he also had a season starting at juco, and his one season at Auburn was the single most dominant season of college football I’ve ever seen.)

And Simpson isn’t young and raw; he was at Alabama for four years and sat for his first three, waiting for his chance behind Bryce Young and Jalen Milroe. One reason so many good NFL quarterbacks have a lot of college starts is because their talent was undeniable from Day 1 on campus.

The second thing going against Simpson: his size. Quarterbacks have succeeded in the NFL at his listed 6-foot-1, 211 pounds or smaller … but not that many.

And in Simpson’s one college season, he suffered a number of injuries, and had an adverse reaction to pain medicine that caused him to lose 20 pounds mid-season due to a severe case of gastritis. I’m not confident he’ll handle NFL-level violence well.

Simpson also has small hands for a QB (9 and 3/8ths inches), perhaps attributable to the fact that Simpsons are famously drawn with four fingers instead of five.

Few outlets had Simpson as a high first-round prospect. The Ringer had him 49th on its big board; the consensus big board had him in the 30s. The Rams drafted him 13th.

A reach like this is particularly surprising from this front office, which has been extremely successful by basically ignoring the NFL Draft as a mechanism for improving its team. The Rams have used just one first-round pick in the last 10 drafts, and GM Les Snead famously wore a shirt that said “f*** them picks” during the team’s Super Bowl victory parade.

But according to multiple reporters, Snead advised Simpson’s family about whether to enter the draft, with NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero going a step farther and saying Snead essentially issued Simpson a guarantee that he wouldn’t fall out of the first round because the Rams would take him at #13.

The Rams have repeatedly flipped picks for proven players, betting on the present rather than a risky future. Sticking to that strategy seems more imperative now than ever, given that they’re built around a 38-year-old quarterback in Matthew Stafford, who had an ominous back injury before the 2025 season (and won league MVP anyway).

Long story short: You don’t have much time left with your Super Bowl-winning quarterback, who is raging against the dying of the light and somehow performing at an MVP level. And instead of using a first-round draft pick to improve the team immediately, the Rams are making a risky bet in preparation for the post-Stafford years?

If this was a joint decision between Snead and Rams coach Sean McVay … it didn’t look like it! McVay looked upset at the post-draft press conference.