We mock the mock draft

The angry trolls were a little disappointed that we, unlike every other football forum out there, offered no mock draft this season.

Well, here's why: there is no more fruitless, meaningless and worthless exercise on the football-fan calendar than the mock draft. Really, we mean this from the bottom of our crusty charcoal hearts.

The Cold, Hard Football Facts have two main purposes:

1) setting the pigskin record straight with the most insightful and most accurate content in the media and

2) calling out the factless heathens who offer you only misguided opinions where Cold, Hard Football Facts should rule

Mock drafts, meanwhile, are mere conjecture and no one has any idea how things will go down on draft day. There are so many variables involved that mock drafts can never be close to accurate beyond the first couple picks of the first round. A single trade has ripple effects up and down the draft order. So, too, does each and every pick. Hey, half a dozen teams want Cedric Benson or Braylon Edwards. The same can be said for 100 different players on the board. But only one gets each, so every other team must go to Plan B, C and D once their top choices are gone. There is no "pundit" with true insight into what each team will do with its Plan A, let alone its alternate options.

Mock drafts, in other words, go against everything that we stand for. They are the slow, ponderous, stifling economic socialism of opinion to our crisp, nimble, rising tide capitalism of Cold, Hard Football Facts.

Still, it seems the truest of trolls find some guilty pleasure in the mock draft. So here's what we will do. After the draft, we'll look at five mock drafts from various "pundits" and compare them to the actual draft. This will give you an idea of what a wasted exercise mock drafts can be.

The real draft is good enough for us. Think of it like beer. Would you waste your time with a mock draft? Of course not. You want a real draft.

***
You would think the annual futility of mock drafts would be enough wasted time for the "pundits." It is not. They continue to piss away precious hours of their lives in the days after the draft by grading each team's selections.

It goes something like this: "Team Blue gets an A for filling their needs at tackle and cornerback. Team Red gets a C because they missed out on Mike Williams and didn't fill their needs on the defensive line."

It sounds good on paper, but do the "pundits" know what each team has planned for free agency, future trades, etc.? More importantly, do they already know which picks are going to be a busts and which are going to be bonanzas? Of course not. The history of the NFL is littered with "can't-miss" picks that did, and late-round picks that blossomed beyond anyone's imagination (think Unitas, Montana and Brady).

If the "pundits" who grade drafts are this good at predicting the future, how come they never see coming Peyton Manning's annual postseason swan dive? Why, after decades of late-season collapses, do they continue to pick Miami to win the AFC East in their preseason previews? Why, why, why?

It's just another exercise in futility.

Come back and see the Cold, Hard Football Facts two years from now. Then we can give you an idea of how each team graded out in the 2005 draft. Doing so before then is a waste of precious time, energy, space and ink.

---

---

Read more: Cold Hard Football Facts, NFL