By James Fedewa 5/1/12

This is a  mock-draft GAME played by “PROFESSIONAL DRAFNIK” sports writers with their respected 2012 mock drafts, giving POINTS to where you projected players/team to  PICK NUMBER and what number that player actually was drafted (with NO baring of trades).  So we can TOTAL up any mock draft, based on these given points to grade your predictions.

Using their “rules” my score was 81!  Not too bad!  (which could have been 10 points HIGHER if I didn’t change my mind at the last second and move Tannehill later in the mock)…

Here is the LINK and the rules:

http://backupquarterbackblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/grading-mock-drafters-peter-king-is.html

Last Monday’s post looked at 7 mock drafts published at the time.  Most mock drafters change their picks as often as The Bachelorette, so the picks we saw three days before the draft only slightly resemble most of these drafters’ “final” mock drafts.  But we happened to capture them at a point in time, and it’s that point in time that we’ll use in grading them.

As a reminder, we used 7 mock drafters: ESPN’s Mel Kiper, Jr. and Todd McShay, Peter King of Sports Illustrated and NBC Sports, Rob Rang of CBSSports.com, Evan Silva of ProFootballTalk.com, Charley Casserly of NFL Network, and some dude named Kash Money from MockingTheDraft.com.  And we considered only the first 11 draft picks.

After the jump, our final rankings and where the mock drafters hit and missed.  Also, you can see our ranking of how the teams drafted, 1 through 32, here.

First of all, there were so many trades this draft that we don’t even consider teams swapping spots.  For these purposes, we only care about whether the drafter got the correct player in a given spot or, if he didn’t, whether his selection for that spot was close to where that player actually went.

A drafter got 10 points if his pick for a given slot was correct.  If it wasn’t, he got 9 points if that player went 1 spot before or after, 8 points if he went 2 spots before or after, etc., etc., with a floor of 0 points if the player went 10 or more spots before or after the given pick.  For example, Rob Rang had Fletcher Cox going sixth overall.  Cox went 12th, so since Rang was 6 picks off, his score for that pick is 10-6 = 4.

Backup Quarterback Blog Mock Draft Rankings (based on mock drafts on 4/23/2012)
1. Peter King, 95 points
2. Evan Silva, 89 points
3. Rob Rang, 83 points
4. Mel Kiper, Jr., 82 points
T-5. Todd McShay, 81 points
T-5. Charley Casserly, 81 points
7. KashMoney, 80 points

As we discussed last week, there was a lot of commonality in the picks.  Everyone nailed Luck (1), RG3 (2), and Tannehill (8), and everyone was one spot off on each of Trent Richardson, Matt Kalil, and Morris Claiborne.

Each of King’s remaining picks were within 3 spots of where the player actually went:
– Justin Blackmon (King picked him 6th, he went 5th)
– Stephon Gilmore (King picked him 7th, he went 10th)
– Fletcher Cox (King picked him 9th, he went 12th)
– Michael Floyd (King picked him 10th, he went 13th)
– Luke Kuechly, (King picked him 11th, he went 9th)

Only Silva was remotely close to King, with each of his picks within 7 spots of the actual pick.

Kiper, McShay, Casserly, KashMoney, and Rang tied for worst pick of the mock drafts; the first 4 each had Riley Reiff going 10th to the Bills (Reiff went 23rd to the Lions), and Rang had David DeCastro going 11th to the Chiefs (DeCastro went 24th to the Steelers).