The Ultimate Mock Draft Simulator!

Get ready for seven rounds of fun as Too Deep Zone mocks the draft with pinpoint accuracy, then has an existential crisis about the whole experience. (Existential crises are fun, right?)

Mock drafts are soooooo late 2010s. Mock draft simulators are all the rage these days. And while Too Deep Zone lacks the capability/resources/interest to create an actual mock draft simulator, we still whipped up not one, not two, but four hypothetical drafts, depending on where your favorite team is picking! 

Mock Draft for Teams Drafting 1-8 in the First Round

First Round: J.J. McCarthy, QB, Michigan. Oh no, your favorite team took the bait and selected Kenny Pickett 2.0, aka slower Daniel Jones, aka Mac Jones with a more rectangular jawline. Your team is doomed.

Second Round: Keon Coleman, WR, Florida. Ewwwwwww. This mock draft stinks. Luckily, you can re-roll!

Mock Draft for Teams Drafting 1-8 in the First Round (After a dozen rerolls)

First Round: That quarterback prospect you really like. (Chargers and Cardinals fans: replace with Marvin Harrison Jr. Yes, you can both use him. Mock drafts are pure bulls**t.)

Second Round: An edge rusher with twitch, bend, twend, a nasty rip/swim/dip/drip/drop move and 3.5 sacks (2.5 of them against McNeese State) in 2023.

Third Round: A safety. Yay.

Fourth Round: Your favorite team traded this pick to move up five slots in the third round way back in 2022. The cornerback they selected with that pick played 53 snaps last year and got beaten for a touchdown by Nick Westbrook-Ikhene.

Fifth Round: A 177-pound slot receiver with 80 catches (60 of them screen passes) in Conference USA last year. He has experience as a return man, so he could be helpful now that the NFL has instituted new kickoff return rules. Wow, what a unique insight!

Sixth Round: A 6-foot-2 cornerback who may be a matchup option against taller receivers. (In other words, he can’t run.)

Sixth Round: Your team got this pick by trading down before selecting the twitchy-bendy second-round guy. They selected a guard who started for three years in the B1G. That’s his entire scouting report.

Seventh Round: A 305-pound nose tackle from the Mountain West Conference. Don’t bother learning his name. 

Mock Draft for Teams Drafting 9-16 in the First Round

First Round: A cornerback from Alabama or Clemson. You know: Kool-Aid McKinstry, Hawaiian Punch Wiggins, Sunny Delight Arnold or Purple Stuff DeJean. (More like “White Stuff” DeJean, amiright?) (Gets booed off Substack.)

Second Round: A Big-12 receiver with track-star speed and track-star hands whose route tree is a cellphone tower. His name is Jaezel Reagor-Mims.

Third Round: A 6-foot-6 tight end who lined up all over the formation, could not be covered by midmajor linebackers and thinks blocking is something a play director does.

Third Round (Compensatory): Some 217-pound off-ball linebacker. Aren’t you glad you let that Pro Bowl wide receiver leave as a free agent last year because he had, like, a bad attitude or something?

Fourth Round: A compact running back with slick moves and fine hands who won’t see the field because he thinks pass protection is something you download from Norton.

Fifth Round: A right tackle who looked pretty good in Senior Bowl pit drills. That’s his entire scouting report.

Sixth Round: A 5-foot-9 cornerback who may be a matchup option against smaller, quicker receivers. (In other words, he couldn’t tackle a middle school shoplifter in a Wawa parking lot.)

Seventh Round: A 6-foot-4 safety from D-3 Wisconsin-Manitosh who earned an invite to Madison’s Pro Day and ran a 4.41 forty before bench-pressing a tractor trailer full of bratwurst. Won’t make the team because he does not fit your new defensive coordinator’s scheme.

Mock Draft for Teams Drafting 17-24 in the First Round

First Round: One of the second-tier offensive tackles, a notch below John Alt, Troy Fautanu or JC Latham. Hey, this is smart, right? Invest in the offensive line! Look, if you are going to keep re-rolling until Rome Odunze falls to your team, why are you even doing this?

Second Round: An edge rusher with size, tenacity, a nasty bullrush/speed-to-power/hump-to-shlump move and 3.5 sacks (2.5 of them when the opposing quarterback scrambled straight into his chest and fell down) in 2023.

Third Round: A “heavy slot” receiver who looked like Deebo Samuel in the ACC but will look nothing like Deebo Samuel when he loses three yards on an end around in November.

Fourth Round: Spencer Rattler. Oooh … intrigue! Is your team’s starting QB, Dependable Veteran who Kinda Stinks or Once-Promising Youngster Whose 2025 Cap Number is Sixty Million, in a wee bit of trouble? Probably not, but we need something to talk about from May until Rattler gets sacked six times in the second preseason game. 

Fifth Round: A three-year starter at left tackle who will have to move to guard/defensive tackle/junior high history teacher because his arms are five-eighths of an inch too short. That’s his entire scouting report.

Sixth Round: A 5-foot-11 cornerback with great athleticism, a nose for the football and an in-your-face attitude who has been arrested sixteen times.

Seventh Round: A small-program wide receiver with a heartwarming personal journey whom The Athletic will publish a 4,300-word profile about in June. You won’t read it.

Seventh Round (acquired by trading down before drafting Fake Deebo in the third round): A versatile defensive lineman who will work his way into the playing-time rotation, quietly contribute for four years, play two more seasons elsewhere and retire to run a small hardscaping company in your region, all without you ever even noticing his career and accomplishments. Seriously, what kind of fan are you?

Seventh Round (acquired when the fourth-round quarterback from three years ago was traded): A fucking punter.

Seventh Round (no one knows where this pick came from; it appeared on the NFL.com ticker, so the deputy GM scribbled some name on a draft card): Dylan Laube, RB, New Hampshire. Laube is a speedy small-program wonder who has experience as a return man, so he could be helpful now that the NFL has instituted new kickoff return rules. Wow, what a unique insight!

Mock Draft for Teams Drafting 25-32 in the First Round

First Round: The Cowboys draft Oregon center Jackson Powers-Johnson. The Bills draft Toledo cornerback Country Time Lemonade Mitchell. Everyone else trades out of the first round for extra picks next year. Seriously, why are you futzing with a mock draft simulator? Your team is good! Go frolic among the daffodils!

Second Round: Insert one of the following binkies: Western Michigan edge rusher Marshawn Kneeland (most fans); Florida wide receiver Ricky Pearsall (Bills fans); Clemson linebacker Jeremiah Trotter Jr. (Eagles fans); USC running back MarShawn Lloyd (Cowboys fans); Yale offensive lineman Kiran Amegadjie (Ivy League fans).

Third Round: A tight end who can actually block, like Kansas State’s Ben Sinnott. If you have not noticed, your team actually knows what it is doing. 

Third Round (Compensatory): Mohamed Kamara, Edge, Colorado State, who arrives with modest expectations but a physical, hustling style, contributes six sacks this year and 8.5 next year, keeping the defense among the best in the league. Aren’t you glad your favorite team makes an effort to hire qualified minority coordinators and front office candidates?

Fourth Round: A free safety who is actually a free safety, not some “positionless defender” who is somewhere between a 208-pound edge rusher and a slot cornerback with the lateral mobility of a school bus.

Fifth Round: A wide receiver whose highlight reel is a little scant but is fast, well-built and a willing blocker. He’ll be in the NFL as a WR4 and special-teams ace for 11 years.

Sixth Round: Griffin McDowell, Tackle, Chattanooga. This is my excuse to link to Arif Hassan’s Wide Left feature on Pro Day standouts. McDowell, or someone like him, will spend 2024 on your team’s practice squad, will fill in for injuries in 2025 and be a Pro Bowl alternate in 2026. 

Seventh Round: You don’t need any more validation, you greedy jerks. 

What’s Brewing at the Too Deep Zone

The next few weeks will be all about the NFL Draft here at the Zone, obviously. Among other offerings in the works:

• McCarthyMania: a long look at J.J. McCarthy and the hype/hysteria/smokescreen surrounding the Michigan QB;

• Quarterback Stat Pack: Want Jayden Daniels’ numbers on deep passes? Drake Maye’s numbers under pressure? You will find all of that here;

• Something Else: I haven’t made my mind up. Maybe the Vikings will pull the trigger on that blockbuster we are all waiting for.

Also, the Draft Week schedule is set:

• Too Deep Team Needs: Monday, April 22nd;

• First Round Analysis: Friday, April 26th;

• Too Deep Draft Assessments: Monday, April 29th

First-round analysis (a more detailed version of my past New York Times riffing) and draft assessments will be for Premium Subscribers only! Why wait to bang your head into a paywall? Join the many premium subscribers who enjoy all of Too Deep Zone’s strangeness and charm today!

By the way, some folks have asked about the seven-round pick-by-pick coverage I used to provide for Bleacher Report from 2015 through 2020. That level of analysis required me to write over 250 scouting reports, using resources I don’t have this year (Senior Bowl notes, for example), as well as dozens of team-specific intros that could be stitched onto the scouting reports when Team X drafted Player Y. Two copy editors pre-read everything in the days leading up to the draft. A third editor read the final product, formatted it for the Internet and ran interference for me in various ways (finding photographs, alerting me to trades, etc.) Needless to say, I cannot do anything like that in real time this year.

In fact, the downshift from that gonzo, zillion-word, Wagnerian-epic level of draft analysis to something smaller and more intimate has been weighing on my mind over the last few weeks.

What is Draft Coverage?

The questions hit me like existential thunderbolts while analyzing Georgia offensive tackle Amarius Mims:

• When will I write about this player?

• When I do write something, who will be the target audience?

• Who really cares enough about Amarius Mims to want to read about him?

• What IS draft coverage, really?

• Why am I doing this? Who even am I?

Mims is a 6-foot-8, 340 pound right tackle from Georgia. He started a few games in the 2022 season, including the BCS playoff games, and six games in 2023, with an ankle injury erasing the middle of his year. He was charged with just seven blown blocks in two partial seasons for the Bulldogs. His blown block rate of 1.1% was the lowest among SEC right tackles with 100-plus snaps in 2023.

Did you find that 73-word “scouting report” helpful? Is it all the information you need? Mims is huge and major-program certified but inexperienced. I even threw in a stat. If you want to see him commit a human-rights violation against a defender, there’s one eight seconds into this video:

If you need more on Mims, there’s Lance Zierlein’s NFL.com profile, where we learn his strengths include:

• Plays with deliberate hand placement and runs feet through contact.

• Keeps weight on inside half when sliding out to rusher.

While his weaknesses include:

• Movements up to second level lack timing and accuracy.

• Feet get heavy when attempting to mirror a cross-face rush challenge.

Zierlein can get a little jargon-y, but not overly so. He’s been writing draft profiles for many years and has the rightsholder muscle to collect inside info. His content is free and easy to access. I cannot imagine anyone needing more detail than Zierlein provides.

So why write more than Zierlein writes?

Without too much searching, I found a scouting report on Mims that included 15 bullet points under “strengths” and another 10 under “weaknesses.” Those bullet points were followed by a few hundred words of further analysis. I appreciate the effort that goes into such a scouting report, but I am not sure how someone can have more strengths than career starts and weaknesses than career blown blocks.

If your favorite team drafts Mims, perhaps at the end of the first round or start of the second, you will probably want to learn much more about him. Fortunately for you, the local beat reporters will get to talk to him at length by the Monday or Tuesday after the draft, then again at rookie camp, then again at minicamp. Your team’s coaches will also weigh in on Mims, and some teams (the Ravens, in years past at least) even invite beat writers to watch film of their draftees with the general manager, who extols each rookie’s virtues.

By June, you will know more than you need to know about Mims. By July, Mims will be going up against, say, Haason Reddick one-on-one, and what Zierlein thought about his cross-face rush challenge in March won’t matter much.

So why dive deeply into Mims, or any of the 200-or-so prospects who fall somewhere between “high first-rounder that casual fans find interesting” and “Daniel Jeremiah could not identify him in a police lineup,” before the draft?

Speaking to prospects

Colorado State tight end Dallin Holker was on his Mormon mission in Chile when the pandemic struck in 2020.

“It was pretty crazy,” Holker recalled during the combine. “On your mission, you don’t have social media or anything like that. You just have a little flip phone. So you don’t know what’s happening in the world.”

Holker was sent home. He had the option to resume his football career when COVID restrictions loosened, but he chose to continue his mission, this time in Yakima, Washington, where the extensive Spanish he picked up in Chile helped him minister to farm laborers. 

“I learned so much, especially in Chile,” Holker said. “There were houses where I couldn’t even stand up, and the floor was dirt. It’s such a humbling experience. But they were so willing to give you anything that they had. I learned so much from them.”

Holker returned to BYU after his second mission, but he transferred to Colorado State after catching just 14 passes in 2021 and 9 in 2022. “Me and my wife prayed about it,” he explained. “My wife ran track there. She was looking for better opportunities as well. I didn’t feel like I was getting the opportunity that I deserved. And she wasn’t either.”

Holker caught 64 passes for the Rams in 2023. “It worked out for both of us, and we’re glad that we did it.” 

Holker was also asked several questions about his hair. Photo by me.

Did you enjoy that 231-word mini-profile? Is it all the info you need on a fourth-to-sixth round tight end? 

By the way: wish Holker a Happy Birthday if you are reading this on the day it was published: he turned 24 years old on April 7th. 

I joked earlier about the mid-major tight end with eye-popping stats who cannot block a lick. Holker is that sort of prospect. Maybe he’s Dallas Goedert. Maybe he’s Adam Shaheen. He’s certainly an interesting fellow, though you would not know it from reading most draft profiles. Few mention the mission at all, even though it leaves a two-year gap in Holker’s college career that should probably be explained. 

I enjoy getting to know prospects like Holker and Steele Chambers, whom I profiled a few weeks ago. But it’s hard to get players to talk about themselves and even harder to get folks to read the resulting features. I also joked earlier about an unread 4,000-word Athletic feature. There’s nothing quite like spending weeks doing legwork for a profile that ends up getting one-twentieth the readership of a mock draft. 

If your favorite team drafts Holker in the fifth round, you might be more interested in learning that he’s married, speaks Spanish and has a fanbase in Chile than learning that (to borrow from one poorly-worded, SEO-friendly scouting report) he “has the skills to stand out in the red zone with sneaky foot speed,” but “could enhance his agility to maneuver more effectively in tight spaces.”

I was Holker’s official Pro Football Writers Association interview transcriber. I chose Holker because his story was interesting. It was hard engaging him, however, because the second and third questions he was asked were “Did you talk to [insert team]?” Good luck getting someone to open up about themselves while being peppered with nonsense questions by a rotating cast of strangers. 

“Did you talk to” questions are the scourge of combine, Senior Bowl and Pro Day interviews. They exist because they pay for an NFL beat reporter’s trip to such events. “Dallin Holker Built Houses in Chile” does not click; “Dallin Holker Spoke to the Bengals” does, even if all Bengals fans learn when clicking is that Holker is a Colorado State tight end who caught 64 passes in 2023. 

After a decade of carping about “Did You Talk To” questions, I am finally learning from them. Eagles fans care about the draft from an Eagles-fan standpoint: give us Jeremiah Trotter Jr., or give us a linebacker who might be better. Jets fans may be highly invested in the differences between Amarius Mims and, say, Tyler Guyton. Bills fans suddenly want to know more about the receivers on the A-minus tier. And yes, there are Michigan and Georgia fans following their draftees’ every move. But few fans care about the draft for its own sake. Unless we are talking about the dozen or so top prospects, most readers need draft coverage that’s hooked to their favorite team in some way. 

Hence, draft simulators: it’s more fun to think about your team’s seventh-round pick than some other team’s second-rounder.

Scouting the prospects

For the record, I prefer Amarius Mims to Tyler Guyton of Oklahoma. 

Guyton, like Mims, is 6-foot-8. He weighed 322 pounds at the combine: he’s leaner than Mims, and it’s visible on tape.

Guyton is another inexperienced lineman: 14 career starts at right tackle. Also, Guyton lined up almost exclusively in a two-point stance for the Sooners, and it was a noticeably high stance, almost like a guy sitting in a high-back bar stool. 

Tall Big-12 tackles who operate out of two-point stances worry me: they may adjust poorly to a three-point stance and/or lose leverage battles against NFL defenders. Guyton, in particular, reminds me a little of Germain Ifedi, the Texas A&M tackle the Seahawks drafted in the first round in 2016 (the Aggies were in the SEC by then, but they still played like a wide-open Big 12 team). Ifedi never became more than an adequate NFL lineman. Guyton’s a fine third-round prospect, but whoever drafts him will need time to develop him.

By the way, which sentence do you prefer?

SENTENCE 1: Tyler Guyton is 6-foot-8; he lined up almost exclusively in a two-point stance for the Sooners and may have leverage issues in the NFL.

SENTENCE 2: Tyler Guyton possesses optimal length and arm extenditure, but his size is often less than advantageous, as he can struggle mightily to achieve ideal positioning against defenders with lower centers of gravity.

Perhaps it's a matter of taste, but I prefer Sentence 1. Most draft profiles on the Internet veer towards Sentence 2, because:

• Guyton’s height is usually listed at the top of his player profile page, so there is no need to restate it;

• Inexperienced/bad writers mistake synonyms and jargon for style and precision; and (here’s the biggie)

• Draft profiles are written for search engine optimization.

When I worked at (ugh) Pro Football Network, I learned that they employed a small battalion of hungry young draftniks to compose profiles for hundreds of prospects, many more than are drafted each year. Such profiles were designed to appear first in any web search for the player in question. They have a target minimum word count of 700 or so: any shorter and Google does not consider them worthy content. Repetition of keywords is a feature, not a bug, and tortuous sentences help writers disguise the fact that they are repeating themselves (and keep them from going barking mad when writing essentially-indistinguishable profiles of obscure, uninteresting players).

Any media outlet which doesn’t have NFL.com/ESPN/The Athletic clout but hopes to compete with Pro Football Network for web traffic must out-SEO them, which means more repetition and keywords, which means less readability and usefulness.

There are also the questions of just who is writing 700 words about Directional State Linebacker, what their qualifications are and where their information is coming from. If you are the type to scoff at, say, Mel Kiper Jr.’s opinion of Drake Maye, how much credence can you possibly lend to an obscure/anonymous newcomer’s 700-word musings on a free safety which contain no stats, quotes or specifics?

Draft coverage has long existed in its own weird pocket dimension where the three-cone drill results of some projected late-round slot receiver matter more than the Stefon Diggs trade. Lately, even the arguments-among-obsessives element has left the building: you can’t have #DraftTwitter without Twitter. I fear that the only target audience for most 700-word player profiles is other stringers seeking information to write their own 700-word profiles. That’s the rat race which is killing our whole industry, and it’s exactly what Too Deep Zone is trying to avoid.

Stats about prospects

Notre Dame tackle Joe Alt was charged with just seven blown blocks in 12 starts in 2023. His blown block rate of 1.0% ranked sixth in the nation among offensive tackles, with some underclassmen and small-program standouts ahead of him. (All stats via Sports Info Solutions.)

Georgia cornerback Kamari Lassiter was targeted just 33 times on 392 coverage snaps in 2023. Only 20 of those targets were catchable, an indication that some of them were glorified throwaways in the general direction of a blanketed receiver. Only 9 of those catchable passes were caught. Lassiter had almost as many passes defensed (8) as completions allowed. 

Washington edge rusher Bralen Trice led the nation with 74 pressures. Since 2019, only Will Anderson had more pressures in a season than Trice, with 81 in 2021. 

Stats are wonderful. They’re concrete. They can be illustrative, when curated properly. They can be misleading, but no more misleading than some confusing remark about an offensive lineman’s “cross-face rush challenge.”

Stats are also almost anathema to draft coverage. For whatever reason (tradition, availability, deniability), scouting profiles are written in the third-person omniscient voice with rare mentions of even basic stats like sacks or touchdowns. 

Dropped pass totals and rates are readily available these days; they vary from source to source, but not by much. Florida State’s Johnny Wilson, a 6-foot-6 wide receiver who will probably be converted into a mediocre tight end, dropped nine passes on 71 targets in 2023. 

Zierlein notes that Wilson “lacks consistent focus, dexterity and hand strength as a pass catcher.” Perhaps that adds insight as to why Wilson drops passes (it’s because he doesn’t catch them well), but “9 drops on 71 targets” imparts the same information more succinctly and precisely.

See, it’s not draft research that’s troubling me. Interviewing prospects, sifting through databases, rewatching Michigan-Penn State for the dozenth time and writing up the results is my idea of a fun day at the office. It’s the concept of writing 700 words on Trice, or turning the Holker profile into some 2,500-word biography, or searching for minute tidbits about 20 different offensive tackles that has me shaking my fist like a weary old man at the whole draft-coverage industry, because I’m not sure if you want to read any of it. 

Serenity about the draft

“So who cares? Is always a writer’s most fearsome uncertainty,” William Least Heat Moon once wrote of his travelogues, which often journeyed into “ordinary” small towns or patches of prairie. “Whatever the genre, a reader may begin to care if writers will look closely and report precisely and with imagination. If they do, they may reveal how maps today might still be accurately labeled with that traditional Renaissance inscription: Here Be Strange Beasts.”

As you saw earlier, I have indeed outlined plenty of draft coverage for the next three weeks. It won’t be in mock draft format or Top 30 Off-Ball Linebackers format. Instead, it will be team-specific, or stat-oriented. It will be narrower than what I have done in the past, but also a little deeper in some places. It will be funny at times, as accurate as possible at all times, and it will always have a point, even if the journey through the draft research process itself is the point. 

In the end, I hope that you will agree that I looked closely and reported precisely, with imagination, about all the missionary tight ends, power forward-sized tackles and already rich-and-famous quarterbacks in this year’s class. Here Be Strange Beasts, indeed, and there is always more to be discovered about them.