The 2018 NFL Draft is finally here and experts are filing their final projections of what Thursday night will look like.
Where do Mel Kiper, Todd McShay, Mike Mayock agree and disagree in their final NFL mock drafts?
There were eight times where three of the top NFL Draft experts all projected a team to pick the same player in their mock drafts.
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With just hours to go before the Cleveland Browns are on the clock with the No. 1 pick, draft analysts are still debating which player will be the choice. While most have expected either Wyoming’s Josh Allen or USC’s Sam Darnold to go No. 1 overall, reports on Thursday morning indicated Oklahoma’s Baker Mayfield is the new favorite to land in Cleveland.
So much so that the godfather of mock drafts, Mel Kiper Jr. of ESPN, moved Mayfield up to the top spot in his final mock draft of the year Thursday after spending all spring with Allen as his pick for the Browns. ESPN’s Todd McShay and NFL Network’s Mike Mayock each stuck with Darnold at No. 1.
In mock drafts from myself and SB Nation’s Dan Kadar, we also have Darnold as the first player off the board.
Here are other spots in the first round where three of the NFL Drafts top prognosticators agreed and disagreed in their final mock drafts of the year:
The unanimous selections
There are eight players that Kiper, Mayock, and McShay all have headed to the same place:
The least surprising agreements are Barkley, Chubb, James, Vea, and Payne. Those five are all the favored selections in our survey of close to 100 mock drafts. Davenport isn’t the most frequently projected player to Seattle, but that also wouldn’t be shocking.
But all three analysts agreeing that McGlinchey will go to the Raiders and Edmunds to the Dolphins is a little eye-opening. Both are paired in less than 10 percent of mock drafts with Oakland and Miami, respectively, with most thinking the Raiders will go defense and Edmunds to go in the latter half of the top 10.
The total disagreements
In most cases in the three mock drafts, at least two of the trio of Kiper, Mayock, and McShay agreed on the pick. Only in seven cases did the three have completely different players for a team:
- Indianapolis Colts: Minkah Fitzpatrick, Roquan Smith, Quenton Nelson
- Detroit Lions: Rashaan Evans, Taven Bryan, Harold Landry
- Carolina Panthers: Calvin Ridley, D.J. Moore, Will Hernandez
- Pittsburgh Steelers: Mike Hughes, Rashaan Evans, Sony Michel
- Jacksonville Jaguars: Hayden Hurst, Dallas Goedert, Courtland Sutton
- Minnesota Vikings: Will Hernandez, James Daniels, Frank Ragnow
- New England Patriots: James Daniels, Josh Jackson, Kolton Miller
In many of those cases, while the analysts picked three different players, they still agreed on the direction the team would draft. All three think the Jaguars will provide Blake Bortles with another receiving threat and all three think the Vikings will shore up the interior of the offensive line in front of Kirk Cousins.
In the case of the Colts, Mayock projected a trade with the Bills that left Indianapolis without the option of taking Roquan Smith or Quenton Nelson at No. 12. Settling for Minkah Fitzpatrick is far from a bad situation, though.
But it doesn’t seem like there’s much of a consensus at all when it comes to the Steelers with predictions of a cornerback, a linebacker, and a running back to go to Pittsburgh.
History tells us the likeliest scenario is that all three analysts will be wrong far more often than they’re right on Thursday.
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