The 2021 NFL season is over. The 2022 NFL Draft season has officially begun.
This year’s Senior Bowl started the clock on the league’s annual countdown between the end of the NCAA campaign and the three-day span in which college football’s best and brightest stars are dispersed throughout the league. We’re now stuck in the brief limbo between the Super Bowl and the Scouting Combine, where we’ll go from watching the two best teams in the league vie for supremacy to watching large men in spandex work out.
But even before the Underwear Olympics can take place in Indianapolis, we’ve got a solid idea of the shape this year’s draft may take. We know this year’s crop of quarterback talent is underwhelming but its wide receivers aren’t. Edge rushers and offensive linemen will dot the top of a draft that appreciates workrate in the trenches above all else. A bunch of Georgia and Alabama guys will be selected, because, of course.
For this pre-Combine look at April’s draft, we’ll focus a little harder on the guys who raised their stock working with NFL coaches at the Senior Bowl. We’ll also give a little shine to the guys capable of boosting their profiles with big workout performances. It’s still entirely too early to make any semblance of an accurate run at predicting the 2022 NFL Draft, but we know what each team will be looking for.
Let’s run with that.