The practice of comparing draft prospects to professional players in any sport has value, though it’s far from an exact science. In football, there are times when you’re evaluating a prospect, and the similarities between a draft prospect and a current or former NFL player just pop right off the tape. From there, you can extrapolate (to a point) how the prospect might best fit in the league as the professional player has.
When you’re making those evaluations public, the value may be in helping a reader to understand more about the unseen prospect at a level with which the reader is more familiar. Comps may allow hardcore NFL fans who don’t watch a lot of college football to divine a prospect’s attributes and liabilities based on that comparison.
It’s also one more step in the evaluative process. When I’m deep in draft analysis, I want to take the tape, measurables, and advanced metrics, put them together, and see how well I can superimpose prospects over pros.
Now that we have the Touchdown Wire Top 50 Big Board up, let’s drill down to the NFL comparisons for our best players in the 2023 draft class, with graphics by the incomparable Coley Cleary:
I’ll compare Brown to another former Big 10 defender in Hooker, who the Titans selected in the fourth round of the 2019 draft out of Iowa. Like Brown, Hooker is an under-tall safety who can play the deep third (and would do so more often were he not in the same secondary as Kevin Byard) and the slot, and uses intelligence and aggression to mask his liabilities.