The annual scouting combine is a perfectly timed piece of business for the NFL. Any earlier and it might be lost in a Super Bowl hangover. Any later and it steps on the toes of free agency announcements and the breathless roster makeovers across the league.
Instead, the tail end of February and beginning of March belong to a week of college stars, clad in spandex and working out to a crowd of millions watching from home. The NFL stokes its own headlines through 40-yard dash times, sound bites from interviews and the vortex of rumors and back-channel chatter that pervades hotel bars in Indianapolis over the course of five nights.
This, balanced against the void of no-football, creates space for speculation and overreaction. Anthony Richardson, for example, vaulted up draft boards and into top overall pick territory thanks to the best combine any quarterback has ever had in the history of the NFL. Will Anderson, the uber-productive pass rusher who had 27.5 sacks the last two seasons at Alabama, has become an afterthought after testing out as merely “pretty good” in Indy.
So here’s an exercise. Let’s make a mock draft where a player’s performance in last week’s drills thoroughly outweighs the previous three to five years of college performance that preceded it. The result is a draft that won’t reflect what’s about to happen in April, but does reflect the current hype cycle as less proven prospects rise wildly and college stars who either turned in OK combines or didn’t work out at all watch their stock fall.
In that case, what would the 2023 NFL Draft look like?