The 2019 NFL Draft is in the books, and that means everyone is mad at their team’s management, but it also means we get to find out who the most accurate NFL Draft experts are.
Our accuracy methodology is unchanged from last year. You can read the full details here. In short, each pick is worth up to 10 points based on 4 criteria:
- How close the analyst was in predicting where the player would be picked overall (4 points)
- How close the analyst was in predicting the player’s rank among his position (3 points)
- Whether or not the team picked the position selected (2 points)
- Whether or not the analyst predicted the correct landing spot for the player (1 point)
This years results are extremely encouraging if you believe in the value of expert knowledge (rather than thinking it’s just luck). We had 3 of 2018’s top-10 experts repeated the feat – Walter Cherepinsky of Walter Football, Evan Silva of Rotoworld and Kevin Hanson of EDHFootball. (Amusingly, all 3 of them actually had the exact same rank as last year). The champion, however, was Charlie Campbell for Walter Football with an incredible mock.
Campbell started off with correctly mocking Kyler Murray to Arizona and Nick Bosa to San Francisco. “So what?” you might ask, “a lot of people got those.” Campbell didn’t stop there – he had 10 perfect picks. If you’ve never tried to make a mock you might not realize how impressive that is – 5 perfect picks would be excellent. 10 is just incredible. He almost had a perfect pick with Marquise Brown to Baltimore at 22. They did draft Brown, but traded down to do it.
2019 Mock Draft Accuracy Standings
| Top 10* Mocks – Overall Leaderboard | ||
| Rank | Analyst | Points |
| 1 | Charlie Campbell – Walter Football | 171 |
| 2 | Walter Cherepinsky – Walter Football | 169 |
| T-3 | Evan Silva – Rotoworld | 166 |
| T-3 | Ben Standig – NBC Sports | 166 |
| 5 | Michael Middlehurst-Schwartz | 165 |
| 6 | Kevin Hanson – EDSFootball | 164 |
| T-7 | Jason La Canfora – CBS Sports | 163 |
| T-7 | Zach Berman – Philly.com | 163 |
| T-7 | Scott Smith – RotoViz | 163 |
| T-10 | Anthony Staggs – FF Statistics | 161 |
| T-10 | Peter Schrager – NFL.com | 161 |
View entire Accuracy Leaderboard (138 mocks graded)
With Campbell putting together this year’s best mock draft and Walter Cherepinsky ranking 2nd in back-to-back years, Walter Football‘s stellar reputation for NFL draft analysis is well-deserved. Behind them was a tie for 3rd place between Evan Silva from Rotoworld and Ben Standig from NBC Sports, with Michael Middlehurst-Schwartz from USA Today in 5th. Props are also due to Kevin Hanson from EDSFootball, not only for repeating his 6th-place performance from last year, but for being the only expert to correctly predict the landing spots of 13 players. The only other expert to have 12 was Scott Smith from RotoViz, who shares 7th place with Jason La Canfora from CBS Sports (who led the field in predicting positional ranks) and Zach Berman from Philly.com (who led the field in predicting Draft Spots). Our top 10 is actually a top 11, because 10th place was a tie between Antony Staggs from FF Statistics and Peter Schrager from NFL.com.
As always, you can view the full standings of 138 mock drafts graded here. Congrats again to all of the analysts the finished atop the leaderboard!
