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Mock Draft Picks

Scored under the published methodology, which sets out what counts as right, what a naive guess would have said, and why an earlier call is worth more than a late one.

Takes logged
4,356
Graded
2,919

67% settled

Average accuracy
66.0

out of 100

Pundits
215

have made one

How these calls land

Every graded call of this kind, bucketed by score.

Takes in each band

020406080
0 — dead wrongscore out of 100100 — nailed it
1460 scored 80+711 scored under 40

Settled or waiting

2,919 / 4,356

graded

1,437 still pending

By season

  • 20211 of 4 graded
  • 202365 of 82 graded
  • 202498 of 113 graded
  • 20251221 of 1402 graded
  • 20261534 of 2755 graded

Who is good at mock draft picks

MissedTakes score for this kind of prediction only — accuracy measured against what a naive guess would have scored. Zero means no better than guessing.

limitedRatings this early are samples, not reputations — the methodology sets out how many articles it takes before we call one settled.

Why so many dead-wrong answers?

Mock drafts are the single biggest source of zero scores on this site — and it is not because analysts are bad at them. It is because a mock draft asks the same person to do two very different jobs, and only one of them is possible.

Accuracy collapses after round one

Average score out of 100, grouped by the round a player was mocked in. The bar is the score; the note is how far the average pick actually missed by.
  • Round 1 · picks 1–321676 picks · off by 10 on average76.3 avg
  • Round 2 · 33–64112 picks · off by 25 on average49.5 avg
  • Round 3 · 65–10094 picks · off by 33 on average38.7 avg
  • Day 3 · 101–175158 picks · off by 41 on average32.7 avg
  • Late Day 3 · 176+93 picks · off by 50 on average26.9 avg

A first-round mock is a genuinely good prediction. Across 1676 first-round picks the average score is 76.3, missing by about 10 places. By late day 3 that has fallen to 26.9, missing by 50.

The order of the late rounds is close to unknowable. Thirty-two teams making a hundred and fifty picks are working from private boards, trades nobody has made yet, and medical information that never becomes public. 38% of every zero-scored pick we hold was mocked after round two.

Which is a hard thing to score fairly, and looking at this chart is what made us change how we do it. Until 2 August 2026 credit ran out at one full round, so a pick 32 places out and one 128 places out both scored zero — and 29% of every pick we held sat on that floor. Credit now halves every sixteen picks instead: the standard for a good pick is untouched, and being wrong by a round is no longer the same answer as being wrong by four. The methodology records the change and the numbers behind it.

An analyst who mocks all seven rounds is still attempting the hardest version of the exercise, and the back half will always score lower than the front. That is why the leaderboard ranks on MissedTakes Score, which comes from how well a mock ordered the draft rather than from its individual picks — a seven-round mock is judged on the shape it got right, not on the length of its tail.

The players who fooled everyone

Where two or more analysts were more than a round out on the same player. One person being wrong is a take; several being wrong the same way is a story.

These are predictions about where a team would pick, not judgements of the player. A slide says as much about thirty-two front offices as it does about anyone’s evaluation.

By publisher

The same record pooled across everyone writing under one banner.

Every mock draft picks take

1901–1925 of 4,356

By topic

NFL — mock draft picks (3000 graded)

Topics we cover today: NFL, US Elections. Every kind of prediction belongs to one of them; this page sits above the topic so that adding another does not mean rewriting every link.