Loyal CHFF readers know that slicing balls into the woods and the water is pretty much par for the course at the Mock Draft Country Club.

 

And the 2009 NFL draft was no exception: another embarrassing weekend for the nation's most visible "mock draft" experts, the guys who devote 365 days a year to pinning down what's going to happen during the NFL selection process and then come up empty on gameday. 

 

We tracked the performance this year of eight football "experts" and we added two notable newcomers for the first time: Mike Mayock of the NFL Network and Peter King of Sports Illustrated.

 

Turns out we should have been looking at those guys all along: Both Mayock and King were the top mock-drafters on our list this year, each with 9 of 32 picks correct (28.1%).

 

King deserves extra credit because he's not on the mock-draft circuit 24x7, like Kiper and McShay. Rick Gosselin of the Dallas Morning News, a regular on the CHFF mock-draft watch list, deserves extra credit, too. He also has another job, like covering the Cowboys. But we were tipped off to Gosselin's success as a mock drafter several years ago, and that tip has proven a good one: Gosselin is consistently among the best at making mock drafts – which, we realize, is kind of like saying you're the most sober guy at the CHFF Christmas party.

 

The others on our list were OurLads.com, consistently the most accurate mock drafters through the years (see chart at bottom), Pete Prisco of CBSSports.com and Jay Glazer of FoxSports.com, the websites of the NFL's two network partners. We also conduct our own mock draft each year with Bonzo the Idiot Monkey, who  randomly  picks names out of the pocket of his Texas A&M hoodie. Despite his primitive methods, Bonzo still got only three fewer correct than Glazer, a human who allegedly possesses inside information and who did NOT randomly pick names out of a hoodie.

 

Mock Drafter	Picks	Pct.
Peter King	9 of 32	28.1%
Mike Mayock	9 of 32	28.1%
Rick Gosselin	8 of 32	25.0%
Mel Kiper	8 of 32	25.0%
Todd McShay	7 of 32	21.9%
OurLads.com	7 of 32	21.9%
Pete Prisco (CBS Sports)	6 of 32	18.8%
Jay Glazer (Fox Sports)	5 of 32	15.6%
Bonzo the Idiot Monkey	2 of 32	6.2%
Total (not including Bonzo)	59 of 256	23.0%

 

Buoyed by King and Mayock, it was actually a pretty good year by the lowly standards of mock drafts.

 

Last year, for example, our six mock draft experts got just 37 of 186 picks correct (19.9%). (There were only 31 first-round picks last year.)

 

But even this year, the 23 percent success rate is incredibly misleading. In fact, almost all the success, as usual, came high up on the list, with selections so easy that even Bonzo got one correct. Our eight mock drafters, for example, all got Matt Stafford-to-Detroit with the No. 1 pick correct. Seven of the eight got Jason Smith-to-St. Louis with the No. 2 pick correct.

 

After that, all hell broke loose. In fact, the rate of success declines pretty rapidly after the first couple of picks, and is generally much worse late in the first round than early in the first round. Our team of experts got:

Remember, these numbers apply only to the first round! Any mock draft that went beyond the first round was just a complete waste of time, with virtually zero correct for anybody.

 

There were some notable successes:

There were some notable misses, too. Most notably as it applied to USC linebacker Rey Maualuga. Believe it or not, Pete Prisco of all people was the only one of the eight on our list who said Maualuga would drop out of the first round, which he did. Almost everybody else had Maualuga in the top 20.

 

There are four mock draft "experts" on the list we've tracked each year since 2005: OurLads.com, Kiper, Glazer and McShay/Scouts Inc.

 

Here's how those four have stacked up over the past five mock drafts (again, this is with first-round picks only). OurLads.com, which gets like zero airtime anywhere, is consistently the best. McShay, whose dad must own ESPN if the amount of airtime he gets is any indication, is consistently the worst.