How do experts build the perfect mock draft?

A mock draft is a weird thing. It’s reporting turned into make-believe, but so many football fans take it as gospel. 

Look at a guy like Auburn’s Keldric Faulk. During the college football season, I saw plenty of mock drafts predicting he would be a top-10 pick. Now, the general belief is that he’s more likely to be taken later in the first round. 

Fans are apt to point to those more recent mock drafts and say that Faulk is “sliding,” but is he? Nothing has actually happened yet. 

We put a lot of stock in mock drafts. I’m a drafthead myself. I’m just as guilty as anyone. 

But they can warp our perceptions of the actual NFL Draft. If you click on an ESPN notification about a new mock from Mel Kiper Jr. the second it pops up on your phone screen, it’s easy to think of this whole process as a race, but that’s not accurate.

The top 10 picks of Mel Kiper Jr’s final mock draft: pic.twitter.com/KpSA6MYypU

— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) April 15, 2026

The NFL Draft happens on April 23. Until then, anything you see or read, any mock draft you pore over, is purely entertainment. The projected picks may come from a place of informed speculation, but the bottom line is every sports site on the internet knows the words “mock draft” are a shortcut to clicks.

It doesn’t mean they are valueless. Sure, they are for entertainment purposes only, but the people putting together mock drafts work their asses off to get the information they use to project each pick. Don’t assume they all do it the same way, though.

ESPN’s Jordan Reid isn’t offering an opinion. He doesn’t think that’s what a mock draft is for.

“It isn’t to create conversation or what we’d personally do with those picks,” he told Awful Announcing. “It’s more so what we’re hearing within the league and how they could approach those picks and which player(s) they could draft at those spots.”

Lance Zierlein doesn’t love this draft class, but he’s putting the same kind of effort into figuring out the 2026 class that he has since 2014, when he first joined NFL.com. He also hosts a morning radio show on ESPN 97.5 in Houston. That’s where he focuses on creating conversations. He agrees with Reid’s assertion that mock drafts are for relaying information. Readers will find a little more opinion in Zierlein’s picks, though, at least early in the process.

“I am assigned four mock drafts,” he said in an email. “The first two mock drafts happen before free agency, so obviously, everything changes drastically after free agency winds down. 

“In my first version, I look at needs and start placing players based strongly on my own player grades.  In the second mock, I often make drastic changes and use it as a personal thought exercise to see how a team (through my choices) might respond to the picks ahead of them. The potential butterfly effect with certain choices in the draft can be pretty incredible when you run through scenarios and contingencies.”

After free agency, things really start to come into focus. Rosters are a little less ambiguous, and teams have to decide how they are approaching the ever-present question of best available vs. biggest need. At that point, anyone letting their opinion guide their mock draft is doing it wrong.

Trevor Sikkema launched the NFL Stock Exchange in 2022 along with NBC’s Connor Rogers. Prior to that, Sikkema spent the past decade doing mock drafts for Pro Football Focus and The Draft Network. 

For him, mock drafts have a cycle to them. Right now, the industry is in the thick of reporting season, but with so many “way too early” mock drafts out there, many are put together without much insight into what a team will do.

“I would say any mock from August to the Senior Bowl in late January — with unanswered questions about future team rosters, needs and coaching staffs — are more for announcing some guys who you might think are first rounders who others might not,” he told me. “I wouldn’t say I never do a mock to purposefully create a stir, but I certainly do mock drafts to get some early personal opinions of prospects out there during the fall and early winter months.”

Sikkema says that it is a natural workflow for mock drafters. After all, you have to make a lot of assumptions when it comes to the way-too-early game. It’s not even entirely clear who will be available and who won’t be.

“99 percent of the time, anyone who is draft eligible is on the table when I am writing early mock drafts. Until a player has officially announced they are going back to school, they’re potentially in the draft pool,” says Sikkema.

Two players have been the subject of rumors, speculation, and debate in the lead-up to this year’s draft. One is because of controversy. The other is because of skepticism. 

Miami’s Reuben Bain Jr. was found to be at fault in a 2024 car crash that left a woman dead. While it wasn’t widely reported, Todd McShay says that information has been well-known for a while now. He even went on to call Ollie Connolly, the reporter who put the information out last week, “a scumbag.”

By no means am I diminishing the severity of the terrible tragedy, but the wording here reads as if this is recent news to NFL teams. It’s not. This has been known and vetted for several months. https://t.co/aru7mHUyrS

— Todd McShay (@McShay13) April 12, 2026

Maybe McShay learned from the blowback that he got when reporting on Jalen Carter ahead of the 2023 Draft. Most seriously, the current Eagle had not only been involved in street racing that left two people dead. A little serious were the teams’ concerns about his personality and ability to coexist inside a professional locker room.

“I had heard the same thing, but there is really no reason to bring that up in January in my opinion,” Zierlein says of McShay’s reporting on Carter. “Let players meet with teams and go through the vetting process. If you find that a player will fall based on what league personnel are telling you, then you can bring it up in April if you know it will have an impact on the draft. The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze for Todd in January, in my opinion.”

Zierlein went on to say that he believes McShay, who said that “everybody knows” about Bain’s reckless driving issues, was referring to NFL personnel, not fellow media members.

But it brings up an interesting point. How does someone like McShay or Zierlein parse through everything they are hearing right now? They may have developed some very good sources over the years, but as the draft gets closer, those sources have an incentive to mislead them. 

The key has been consistency. He has sources who have become friends. They know his goal is to figure out a player’s range and how teams view individual prospects. Zierlein knows that sometimes his friends can’t answer his questions. Accepting silence has been a good way to avoid being part of a team’s smokescreen, mostly.

“Sometimes you can tell right off the bat that you aren’t getting honest answers, and sometimes you don’t find out until after the draft,” he says. “You store that away for future reference. I usually won’t [report] anything on social media or on broadcast unless I’m very certain about it.”

The other prospect that has created a lot of conversation is Alabama’s Ty Simpson. While the draft industrial complex has come to a consensus that Indiana’s Fernando Mendoza is 2026’s best quarterback prospect, nearly as many people have Simpson at number two on that list.

One notable exception has been Jordan Reid’s ESPN colleague Dan Orlovsky, who has come under intense scrutiny for saying that Simpson would be his pick between the two. There have even been accusations that Orlovsky’s opinion is propaganda on the Bama QB’s behalf and that ESPN is “manufacturing” a story.

Reid doesn’t see it that way. He will remind anyone dismissing Simpson that the guy was legitimately in the conversation to be 2026’s QB1 for most of the college football season. Reid also knows that someone (his best guess is Arizona) is likely to make a move in the back half of the first round to make sure that Simpson doesn’t get away. 

Quarterbacks are important. Teams rarely make rational decisions when they need one and don’t have the top pick.

“That’s why it’s important to have a grading scale for all positions, so that you won’t give, what I like to call, the ‘QB Bump’ because of the importance of the position,” Reid says. “Ty’s the most polarizing prospect in this year’s class because of his limited number of starts… Cam Newton is the only QB with that sample size to go on to have success in the NFL. Cam and Ty are obviously polar opposites in every way imaginable as players, but there’s plenty to like about Simpson. He’s extremely smart, as he’s the son of a college coach, always in command and shown to be accurate.”

At the core, is a mock draft simply clickbait? If so, time has proven just how effective dropping and hyping first-round projections can be. It’s not just civilians like you and me that are drawn to them.

“I have certainly had instances where I’ll be talking to an agent of a player, and they’ll reference where [I have their client going] and try to pump up their guy,” Sikkema says. “That is very natural. If they have useful intel on if a player interviewed well with a certain team or one organization showed a lot of interest, then that can be valuable. I’ll get some feedback from people who work for teams around the league if they see me mock a certain player of intrigue to them.”

Those executives tend to know who has a history of making accurate predictions before draft night. Sikkema says he has never had anyone from a team criticize his picks or tell him he doesn’t know what he is talking about, but he has figured out a pattern that tells him when a team thinks his projected pick for them is wrong.

“Usually if they want to talk about a player, [it’s because] the [team is] not super interested in them. It tends to be quiet on the team side of things when it comes to talking about players they actually like.”

Mock drafts began in the 1940s. Ray Byrne, who ran a funeral home in Pittsburgh, is believed to have published the first one. More than 80 years later, they are everywhere. Some are put together with better information than others, but it’s hard for football fans not to be intrigued every time they see those two words pop up on their screen.