What if we could model the draft?
It's not a new idea; the people at DraftTek do that essentially everyday, while the folks at Fanspeak, with their On The Clock simulator need to do much the same for you to be able to use their mock draft generator. I decided to give it a stab with the Consensus Big Board.
I asked Steve Shoup at Fanspeak to provide me with the fan voting results for team needs, and I used those, along with historical positional value in the draft, the depth of the draft and the consensus board to create a draft model that would try to fit teams to their needs and the best position available, all while keeping mindful of how deep a draft is at a position.
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With all of that together, I created a seven-round mock draft with one constraint: each position could only be drafted once by each time (meaning we don't get a Robert Griffin-Kirk Cousins dynamic), except under fairly unusual circumstances—so teams with multiple needs at the same position may be left in the dust.
The seven-round mock draft below (organized by round in the first gallery and by team in the second gallery) demonstrates the first stab at that approach. It probably overvalues depth, as teams were reaching too much for tackles and undervalued safeties, but for the most part is at least a fun exercise in what HAL might do if it could draft.
That means Cleveland, right?
[gallery columns=1" size="full" td_gallery_title_input="Seven Round Mock Draft" td_select_gallery_slide="slide" ids="12312,12313,12314,12315,12316,12317,12318]
And for team-specific results, look here:
[gallery columns=1" size="full" td_select_gallery_slide="slide" ids="12319,12320,12321,12322,12323,12324,12325,12326,12327,12328,12329,12330,12331,12332,12333,12334,12335,12336,12337,12338,12339,12340,12341,12342,12343,12344,12345,12346,12347,12348,12349,12350]
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