With the 18th overall pick in the 2026 NFL Draft, the Minnesota Vikings selected Caleb Banks, DT out of the University of Florida. In a draft full of surprises, Banks was nevertheless one of the most surprising picks of the first round, ranked 37th by the consensus board and taken in front of two other interior defenders ranked ahead of him in Peter Woods and Kayden McDonald.

In drafting a player who was rated much lower by consensus, it makes sense to question whether the Vikings should have tried to trade back and draft Banks later to at least recoup some value if the team was going to reach. It’s reasonable to infer that the Philadelphia Eagles would have been willing to offer the trade they made with the Dallas Cowboys at 20 to go up to 18 with the Vikings. To move up, the Eagles traded 23, along with two 4th-round picks — 114 and 137 — while acquiring a 2027 7th-round pick on the way back.

Pasting that exact trade would have the Vikings losing by about a fringe 4th/5th round pick on the Jimmy Johnson chart — coincidentally exactly pick 137 — but exactly equal on the Rich Hill chart and as significant winners on the analytics-based charts. Assuming Banks would still be there at 23, and he likely would, the trade would be a huge win for the Vikings.

The Vikings faced a similar situation last year, where they reached compared to consensus on Donovan Jackson. The two teams immediately behind them, the Texans and Rams, traded back and gained capital.

Navigating the board is an important skill for a GM and a big part of the reason Kwesi Adofo-Mensah got fired, so it’s disappointing that the Vikings chose not to try that with this pick. It could be the case that the people steering the ship now, specifically Kevin O’Connell, are averse to trading down in the first round after the failure of Lewis Cine and Andrew Booth in the 2022 draft.

Table of Contents:

• Caleb Banks and the Consensus Board

• Why the Low Rank?

• Athletic Testing

• Production

• Film

  • Athletic Ability

  • Hand Usage

  • Power

  • Mental Processing

  • Effort

• Summary and Role Fit

Caleb Banks and the Consensus Board

It would be one thing if Banks were a uniquely polarizing prospect — the evidence suggests that reaches are more justified for those players — but the range of ranks across analysts for the Florida defensive tackle was about average. Ty Simpson, Malachi Lawrence and Keylan Rutledge were far more polarizing.

Banks was generally ranked between 29th and 45th among analysts, though there were extremes — three analysts ranked Banks below the 120 mark, and three analysts ranked him in the top 15, including one top-ten ranking.

Usually, with big steals or reaches, the Forecaster board — which consists of analysts who have access to insider information like Dane Brugler and Todd McShay — ranks the steal and/or reach closer to their actual NFL draft slot. That wasn’t the case this time, with the Forecaster board ranking him 40th.

Gridiron Grading was one of the analysts who ranked Banks beyond slot 120, placing him 121st overall. They don’t have a written scouting report, but they do have a card covering some production and athleticism metrics, which we’ll cover in more detail later on.

To get good context for the general regard among those skeptical of Banks, we need to find written scouting reports or recorded analysis of Banks. CBS Sports’ Mike Renner, who ranked Banks 92nd overall, has both.

Renner wrote in his big board piece, “No defensive tackle in the class has more impressive reps on film than Banks. When he puts it all together, he looks truly dominant. The problem is those reps are nowhere near consistent. That’s concerning for a player who missed most of 2025 with an ankle injury and has played fewer than 1,000 snaps in his career.”

For CBS Sports, he also recorded a video grading the pick, saying “My lowest grade yet, it’s a D for this pick for a number of different reasons. I think we’ll start with the positives though. Caleb Banks is a prodigious physical talent. He is 6’6”, 327 pounds with an over 7-ft wingspan and his get-off is special. When he gets off low into contact, he can have some dominant reps.”

He added, “Problem is we just never saw it consistently at Florida or throughout his career in college. He only had 14 career run stops over five seasons in college football. And then this past year, he breaks his foot mid-season, comes back, plays a little at the end, doesn’t look like the dominant guy he necessarily did at the end of 2024, goes to Senior Bowl, has an okay week, but then he broke his foot yet again at the NFL Combine, had to have another surgery.”

“So, a big guy with multiple surgeries in the past year who’s never been consistent is just to me too much of a risk to take at number 18 overall, even if his physical tools are at the high end for the position,” he finished.

Joe Goodberry was also a critic of the pick and ranked Banks 79th overall. His scouting report goes over many of the same elements. Impressed with Banks’ athleticism, he wrote, “Caleb Banks has flashes of a super star. He can move laterally and jump a gap at the snap in a blink or he can bull rush right through blockers with ease. The high-end plays are truly incredible.”

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“The flashes are what will sell teams, but Banks has a ways to go before he’s that player on a consistent basis. Too often, Banks plays with poor leverage and conditioning,” he adds. He called Banks “one of the worst tacklers we’ve ever seen.”

At the high end, we see Charles McDonald of Yahoo! Sports, who ranked Banks ninth overall. During the Yahoo! livestream of the draft, he said, “He’s got things that you can’t teach. 6’6” 330, and he ran a 5-second 40-yard dash with a 35-inch vertical on the broken foot. I’m a Falcons fan, so when I see that, I think Julio Jones, right? Because that’s what he did back in 2011 when he ran the 4.3 on the broken foot. And he’s got things that are really hard to teach, too, like the block recognition. When your hands and feet are supposed to be synchronized with the defense as the play goes. He’s got moves, he’s got great awareness.”

He caveated with his primary negative, adding, “It’s just the tackling, man. He’s got, what, like two tackles in three games? And I swear to god he could have had 10 TFLs in those games. But he just can’t finish.” Reasoning it out, he said, “I guess they’re probably looking at it like, ‘can Brian Flores teach this guy how to tackle? Because if he can, you’ve got an All-Pro defensive tackle because there’s just not guys that are built like this that can move like that.”

When Andrew Siciliano pushed back, suggesting it’s asking quite a lot for the 18th overall pick to be taught how to tackle, McDonald responded by adding, “But what I don’t have to do is teach him how to read a down block in real time and how to split double teams, and that’s the hard stuff. We can get the framework and the strength and the technique he already has. You can do the hard stuff, why can’t you just tackle the guy?”

Renner’s coworker at CBS, Ryan Wilson, ranked Banks 15th overall on his big board. He didn’t place Banks in his final first-round mock draft, reasoning that the injury could spook teams off of him, but the last time he placed Banks in a mock, he said, “At 6-foot-6 and 330 pounds with 35-inch arms, Banks is surprisingly explosive for his size, playing with power, juice and a nonstop motor. A foot injury sidelined him for parts of the 2025 season, but he took part in all three Senior Bowl practices and was pretty much unblockable on every rep. If he’s fully healthy, he has top-10 ability.”

One of the experts who placed Banks closer to his median outcome, Lance Zierlein for NFL.com, wrote of Banks when ranking him 33rd overall, “Big-framed, long-limbed interior defender whose play needs more polish to consistently match his traits. Banks has a quick first step. He can stun/control single blocks when his hand strikes are timely and accurate, but he needs faster disengagement to increase his tackle count. His high center of gravity allows double teams to generate displacement, so a move to odd-front end could be in his best interest as a run defender.”

“Like a grappler without submission knowledge,” Zierlein wrote, “Banks is still learning to unlock his physical advantages so he can turn them into sacks. His traits and flashes at the Senior Bowl make him an enticing prospect, but injury concerns are a potential stumbling block for him.”

It seems as though, despite his middling variance score for players ranked around 37th overall, Banks was generally regarded as an extremely boom-or-bust prospect.

Why The Low Rank?

A large part of the reason Banks was ranked so low on the consensus board was a tumultuous 2025 season and pre-draft process. Banks broke his foot in Florida’s training camp before the season. He tried to play through the injury, but reaggravated it in his first game, against LSU. He underwent surgery to repair the Jones fracture he had suffered in his fifth metatarsal.

He recovered from that injury and was able to get healthy to play the final two games of Florida’s season, when the team was 3-7. Healthy, Banks attacked the pre-draft process, competing in the Senior Bowl and testing at the Combine. However, during his athletic testing preparation, he broke his foot again, this time a fourth metatarsal fracture. He was able to put up his excellent athletic testing despite that fracture, but the repeat injuries caused his draft stock to decrease.

It’s worth noting that, before the draft, it was reported that Banks expects to fully recover from his second foot injury by June. @Skol_Doc, an actual foot surgeon, provided analysis about Banks’ injury history in this YouTube video. The broad takeaway is that Banks’ injury should not be a major concern moving forward — the Jones fracture seems to have been fully healed, and the fourth metatarsal fracture should be a very clean recovery. Skol_Doc did mention that ultimately, Banks’ weight was a factor for the injury. In athletes, size can contribute to injuries, but do not suggest recurring injury issues.

In other words, his weight may have played a role in his foot injuries this time around, but there’s little evidence to suggest that will continue to be the case.

Banks’ injury issues seemingly played a major role in his perception and consensus board ranking. It’s difficult for analysts to rank a player highly after they’ve missed significant time with injury. It’s one thing to bet on a talent who missed a season with injury — like Jermod McCoy, who fell way further than anyone expected — but Banks’ limited season combined with yet another foot injury likely spooked many analysts and dropped him down boards.

Dane Brugler from The Athletic, a plugged-in forecaster who also helps set expectations for many draftniks, provides a great example of Banks’ fluctuating stock. In an in-season top 100, Dane ranked Banks 46th on November 11th. On February 10th, post-Senior Bowl, Banks had risen all the way to 24th on Dane’s board. Then, after the Combine injury, Banks fell again, ranking 52nd overall in the Beast, Brugler’s draft guide.

It’s not difficult to think of players who have fallen down the board due to injury concerns — McCoy this year, Will Johnson last year, or even further back to players like Myles Jack, Jaylon Smith, or Maurice Hurst. Because Banks was hurt during the process, the situation could have hurt his consensus rank without really affecting his draft stock; the Vikings have very publicly stated that they believe the medicals are clean, with interim GM Rob Brzezinski calling the Vikings’ medical staff “the best in the world.”

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Without fully built-out consensus board data going back to January, it’s difficult to create one-for-one comparisons that contextualize Banks’ rankings on a theoretical consensus ranking before the NFL Combine to the one published immediately before the draft.

We do have something similar, however. Mock draft data doesn’t serve the same purpose as big board data given that they are meant more to capture predictions than player talent, but they help us here.

The former Florida lineman injured his foot during the Combine, but news of the foot injury didn’t reach the public until March 12. Given that his Combine performance marked him as a “riser” — especially when compared to fellow defensive tackle Peter Woods — Banks’ stock should have improved rather than fallen.

That’s what we see in reporting and in the data. Between the Super Bowl and the Combine, where he was cementing his perceived talent level after a successful Senior Bowl, he was projected to be selected around pick 25. After an outstanding Combine, his floor rose from the 27th pick to the 25th, while his median outcome improved to the 22nd selection. His ceiling projection improved from 19th to 13th, with the Ravens at 14 a reasonably popular pick.

But after the news of the injury broke, his stock seemingly plummeted. His median projection fell from 22nd overall to 28th, and his ceiling dropped to 22. At this point, he was beginning to drop out of the first round with some regularity. After he was seen on a scooter at the Florida Pro Day, his median dropped one more spot to 29th, but, most significantly, his range of outcomes expanded massively. His 25th percentile outcome fell from 31st to 41st, while his 75th percentile outcome dropped from 22nd to 25th.

The four box plots at different moments in the draft process help us understand what happened, but it’s made starker by a two-moment box plot.

The box plots probably tell the story best, but a weighted line chart might help as well.

Because of the ten-day delay between his Combine testing and the news of his foot injury, we can be reasonably confident that Banks’ stock was almost entirely due to the news about his reinjured foot.

Athletic Testing

That makes sense because he was an outstanding athlete at the Combine. Banks measured in at 6’6 ¼” and 327 lbs with massive 35” arms and an 85 ¾” wingspan. Despite his weight, he looks very well built on screen, and looks almost slim, which is incredible for a player who weighs 327 lbs. Based on the testing, Banks is an incredible athlete for his size.

This athleticism chart is weight-adjusted. That means all values are adjusted for the athlete’s height and weight; running a 5.04-second 40-yard dash is significantly more impressive (and meaningful) at 327 pounds than at 285 pounds. His chart is almost completely filled out. Compare that to all the first-round defensive tackles who performed the same workouts as Banks over the last three years.

What is not captured in the chart is the fact that Banks did all of this on a broken foot. He broke his foot before testing at the Combine and the news of the injury didn’t hit outlets until ten days after his 40-yard dash.

While he was listed on the consensus board as a nose tackle — something his size might suggest — he won’t play that role for the Vikings. Banks said during his introductory interview that he is expecting to play defensive end in the Vikings’ system, which is similar to the role Jonathan Allen played last year.

The Vikings took a true nose tackle in Domonique Orange in the third round, solidifying that projection. That role matches the alignment Banks played at Florida, where he spent the vast majority of his time in the B gap, per PFF. Banks’ upside case is more like Chris Jones — another tall, long interior player — than a true nose like Dexter Lawrence.

It is important to note that this is not a complete athletic profile. Any reasonably solid athletic profile that aims to project defensive tackle performance — especially for pass-rushing tackles — will need to incorporate agility scores.

The evidence suggests that three-cone times help project outcomes for three-technique tackles, four-technique defensive ends and edge rushers. Good examples include both Sheldon Richardson and Geno Atkins, who ran very quick three-cones at 7.33 seconds; Atkins did so in 2010 and Richardson did so in 2013.

Gerald McCoy posted a 7.32-second time in 2010 in the same class as Atkins and Ndamukong Suh, who ran it in an astounding 7.21 seconds. Calais Campbell ran a blazingly quick 7.19-second three-cone in 2008. Aaron Donald ran it in 7.11 seconds in 2014, Kobie Turner ran it in 7.08 seconds in 2023, Fletcher Cox ran it in 7.07 seconds in 2012 and Milton Williams ran it at 6.95 seconds in 2021.

J.J. Watt, who started his career as an interior defender, ran it in a shocking 6.88 seconds. Most of the high-level pass-rushing defensive tackles you’ve seen play have run outstanding three-cone times.

So, we don’t have that. Banks seems like he moves well and we could argue that his weight-adjusted three-cone would likely be good. But that is just speculation — many defensive players have been described as athletic who have put up mediocre athletic testing numbers.

For what it’s worth, Next Gen Stats has an athleticism score that combines proprietary information, like access to on-field tracking data, along with tested athleticism. Within those scores, he produced an “80” out of 100 for their athleticism score metric.

Production

From an analytics perspective, evaluating a player with production in mind gives us a bit more to work with to figure out what they can do and the odds of their success. Obviously, the final year of production doesn’t tell us much for Banks, who only played three games in 2025.

Those games won’t even provide very much as some of them came after he returned from injury and there seems to be evidence his explosiveness was limited by that injury — something that did not seem to be the case when he was more fully recovered when practicing at the Senior Bowl.

At first glance, Banks’ production in 2024 was pretty good. His 13.0 percent pressure rate ranked eighth among all defensive tackles in Division I college football, and his pass rush win rate ranked in the 93rd percentile. When isolating snaps without screens or play-action with true dropback passing, he retains that high-level win rate and pressure rate, ranking fifth in pressure rate in those situations.

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But for those who want to be notified by newsletter when a new podcast is posted or want to subscribe internal to the Substack app, this option now exists with its own RSS feed.

Episode Notes:

• I mentioned a video by SkolDoc, who I occasionally refer to as FootSkol. That video is here

• Learn about Jacob Thomas here at the James Madison website

• Here is the Consensus Big Board

• I discussed using this particular Consensus Board

• I used the Consensus Board to find the most polarizing players in the draft

• Forecasters vs Evaluators: What’s the Difference and Why Does it Matter?

• The Consensus Big Board Grades the 2026 NFL Draft

Follow us on Twitter / Bluesky

• Arif - @ArifHasanNFL / @arif.bsky.social

• James - @bigmono / @norsecodpocast.bsky.social

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The 2026 NFL Draft is over, which means it’s time to talk about the 2026 NFL Draft.

We have a bunch of data on incoming rookies and we can use it to figure out how teams have done when acquiring those rookies. No approach is perfect of course, but we can at least use our collective wisdom to figure out which teams have best pushed the odds in their favor given what we know.

Table of Contents:

• Is the Consensus Board “Groupthink?”

• Can the Consensus Board Grade Picks?

• What About Steals and Reaches?

• Is This Any Good for Judging Teams?

• 2026 Consensus Big Board Draft Grades

  • Winners

  • Losers

  • Position-Blind Grades

If you want to see the ranks themselves, we’ve got this (free) piece that lists the Top 300 players.

The benefit to a project like the Consensus Big Board is that we can look back on previous classes and see if we were any good at figuring out good draft classes from bad.

The Consensus Big Board project was started with the idea that there is value in bringing together intellectually diverse approaches to evaluating college players and that we’d learn a great deal by casting a wide net when it came to the extraordinary amount of information produced about the NFL draft.

Paul Noonan at Acme Packing Company did an excellent job capturing my thought process in his piece on the subject.

One of the best books ever written on aggregating data in order to make better decisions and predictions is The Wisdom of Crowds by James Suroweicki, and the consensus draft boards are almost textbook examples of smart data aggregation. The board concept itself is built on a simple but effective aggregation method, and it relies on contributors who are independent, who have a fierce diversity of opinion, and who bring specialized, local knowledge to the task.

This year, no player who was drafted by the NFL was unranked by the Consensus Big Board. Two years ago, no player who was drafted was outside of the top 550, a record.

The first player outside of the Top 300 drafted this year was Max Bredson, fullback for Michigan — drafted by the Minnesota Vikings 159th overall and ranked 317th on the Consensus Big Board. This ties the latest we’ve ever seen a player picked that was off the Top 300 board, which was in 2020 when the Patriots selected kicker Justin Rohrwasser 159th overall.

Rorhwasser ranked 796th on the larger board, and the Patriots cut him in camp shortly after a cycle of news focused on his white supremacist tattoo, which had been discovered by Justis Mosqueda of Acme Packing Company during the draft and had been removed by Rohrwasser a few months later.

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Last year, Ruben Hyppolite II was drafted 132nd overall by the Chicago Bears. In 2024, it was the Detroit Lions drafting Givanni Manu 126th overall. It might be an NFC North thing at this point.

This year also ties the fewest number of players drafted who were outside the Top 300 — 20, tying the 2024 NFL draft.

This could mean either that NFL teams are becoming more efficient at drafting or that analysts are becoming more efficient at identifying prospects worth drafting.

For what it’s worth, feedback from NFL scouting personnel tells Wide Left that it’s most likely a mix of both. NFL teams have confirmed with Wide Left that they use some version of a Consensus Board in their draft planning. None of the teams that have contacted Wide Left have indicated they use the Consensus Board to alter their opinions of players, but they will use the board in order to get an understanding of where players will be drafted.

At least two teams Wide Left has talked to about the Consensus Big Board have mentioned that they use a combination of a Consensus Board, mock drafts and their own team grades to project where players will go in the NFL draft.

That last element is important, of course, because teams have unique and proprietary information on those players; only they could evaluate the injury concerns for Jermod McCoy or any off-field concerns they discovered in the process of scouting players.

Let’s engage in discourse, then talk about data validation for why it makes sense to at least absorb the Consensus Board grades.

Is the Consensus Board “Groupthink”?

Like with any academic term that has entered the broader social sphere, “groupthink” has lost a lot of its original meaning. Groupthink is not the concept of a large number of people having opinions.

It had primarily been used to describe the notion that people would, through social pressure, be forced into a narrow range of irrational opinions. It is an iterative process, where people with opinions outside of that range are either socially excluded or coerced somehow into changing their opinion.

One element that characterizes “groupthink” is the lack of innovation, independence or creativity in the so-called “group” being coerced into one strain of thought. This was initially used to describe policymaking, with one of the most famous case studies involving the policy process behind the Bay of Pigs invasion.

The issue is not that a group of people made a decision — that is inevitable in any policy outcome. If that were the issue, then groupthink would lose all meaning because any collective activity would be called groupthink. Instead, it was used to describe the internal social process among those making the decision to quash disagreement and data that contradicted their desired outcome.

This often requires value-setting priorities that place group cohesiveness ahead of independent thought, insulation from the group, and a leadership mechanism that isn’t impartial.

None of this applies to the Consensus Board, which does not operate with a leader, does not isolate its contributors and does not punish people with independent thought. In fact, many of the people whose boards contribute to the Consensus Board project are delighted to receive a version of the below message from me when I incorporate their board:

Many draft analysts who receive this message use it to explain who “their guys” are and why they love or don’t love a prospect. This is not a mechanism for getting them to conform to the consensus but to celebrate their perspective on how it differentiates from the consensus.

This independence is important — studies on the idea of “wisdom of the crowds” have found that it works best when the contributing members do not confer on their agreed-upon conclusions. This independence was one of the four essential pillars when the concept was introduced into the public sphere.

Anyone calling this exercise groupthink does not understand the concept of groupthink or the nature of the Consensus Big Board project.

Can the Consensus Board Grade Picks?

In a sense, anything can grade picks. Why not?

But for the purposes of this piece, we want to ask if it’s providing any information worth digesting. The evidence suggests it does. First, we can talk about people who are not affiliated with Wide Left and what they’ve found about using the Board for evaluation purposes.

Timo Riske at PFF performed an analysis of how the Consensus Big Board performed when compared to NFL draft order when predicting player performance, as measured by PFF Wins Above Replacement.

His research found that the Consensus Board was nearly as good as the NFL, despite a few significant disadvantages.

The first disadvantage is pretty obvious: the NFL has control over player outcomes, and the board does not.

The NFL knows how they plan to use players and has an incentive to develop players they draft. Scheme fit is big, and a generic board can’t accommodate all of the synergies of specific teams, coaches and teammates. A team prioritizing outside-zone-style blocking will place athletic guards higher on its board and eliminate slow-footed blockers from consideration.

Even if the Consensus Board nearly perfectly identified talent, one would expect to see higher snap counts for higher draft picks early in their rookie contracts just because of these elements — scheme fit and investment cost. And snap count helps contribute to measures like WAR.

But that’s a small reason. Because PFF’s data relies on WAR, a statistic that depends on a player’s contributions to winning, the measure — and the NFL — overindex on quarterbacks compared to the board. Correcting for that might eliminate the NFL selection process's advantage in WAR-dependent metrics entirely.

Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that the public is bad at evaluating quarterbacks, it just means that the big boards are not necessarily designed with the intention of maximizing wins, as they are supposed to rank players by talent. The NFL draft, however, has only that one goal: maximizing wins. And that’s why quarterbacks are drafted at the very top.

Another big reason the NFL should have a larger advantage than it seemingly does has to do with the intangibles or invisible elements of a player evaluation. That can be something as minor as locker room leadership or as major as a degenerative medical condition that limits the career lifespan of a prospect.

The evaluators building the boards that end up contributing to the consensus generally don’t know if the stinger a player suffered their sophomore year contributed to a long-term nerve condition or was a minor nothing injury. The NFL does.

Without medical information or other factors like work ethic and practice habits, draft analysts who rely on publicly reported player information — all without access to character profiles, psychological data or player interviews — are at the mercy of players who may not even like playing football.

In addition to all of that, NFL teams have more time and resources — they invest in training their scouting staff, sending them to games across the country and spend more than 40 hours a week per person nailing down their process. Many of the analysts who contribute to the board have a keen eye but are fighting an uphill battle to reach the level of expertise that time and training can provide.

Riske’s approach isn’t the only one that has confirmed the value of the big board in these applications. One may argue with PFF grades – fairly so – but even if we can all agree that they are directionally correct, they aren’t gospel. The thing is, nothing really is and we can all disagree on player performance and value.

One alternative perspective is to see how the NFL itself handles these draft picks. That’s why Jason Fitzgerald’s study into second contract value for draftees is so valuable here. He also found that the Consensus Big Board was about as good as the NFL itself at rank-ordering players.

On our end, we published a deep dive two years ago that looked at every analyst we had data for and at the Consensus Big Board, comparing their rankings and the NFL draft to player outcomes.

Last year, we added 2022 data to that work, and it, unsurprisingly, continued the trend.

What About “Steals” and “Reaches”?

The data analysis performed for the 2024 grading piece tells us that NFL performs a little bit better than the Consensus Big Board when looking at all 700 or so picks in the first three rounds of the NFL draft from 2016 to 2021.

But that advantage comes almost entirely from small gains made on even value picks – things we wouldn’t call steals or reaches, like when the Bengals drafted the number two player overall at number one when they took Joe Burrow. That’s not really a reach, and we can craft our analysis to exclude those cases.

The NFL achieves tons of tiny wins by being a little closer to the correct rank-order value for picks where the board and the NFL don’t really disagree. The math I performed last year came to the conclusion that the NFL won about 52 percent of those even-ranked matchups when it came to assessing player value.

The picks with substantial disagreements were more interesting. Over the past two years, we’ve been adding data to this exercise.

In 2023, the biggest misses by the consensus board don’t actually seem like huge misses; the Consensus Big Board regarded Jalen Carter as the third-best prospect in that draft when his actual draft position of ninth seems closer to his actual value. Dawand Jones (40th) and Kelee Ringo (38th) were pretty big misses. The draft was also correct to value Jack Campbell (ranked 45th, drafted 18th), Darnell Wright (ranked 24th, drafted 10th) and Jahmyr Gibbs (ranked 26th, drafted 12th).

On the other hand, the board seemed more correct on Darnell Washington (ranked 31st, drafted 93rd), Brian Branch (ranked 16th, drafted 45th) and Joey Porter Jr. (ranked 12th, drafted 32nd). It identified the draft overvaluing Anthony Richardson (13th vs 4th), Juice Scruggs (175th vs 62nd) and Brodric Martin (260th vs 96th).

Let’s first take a look at the results in the first round, when the Consensus Big Board either identifies a big steal or a big reach, ignoring those picks where the value is within 15 percent of the pick capital.

80 percent of reaches in the first round fail to meet their pick slot value, which is astounding. In a surprising reciprocity, nearly 20 percent of steals fail to meet their board rank value. So this tells us we should pay much more attention to reaches than to steals.

That makes sense — it takes just one team to misevaluate and reach for a player. But a steal requires multiple teams to come to the same conclusion, making it less likely that someone made a mistake.

But there was a very small sample of steals and a very large sample of reaches. That’s what we would expect; there are very few players to “steal” in the first round because high-ranking players are supposed to be selected there.

What happens in the second and third rounds? Adding in 2023 data made the consensus board worse than the 2016-2022 results, but not enormously so.

It seems as if both the Consensus Big Board and the NFL are “overconfident” when they determine they know a player is substantially more talented than where the other has ranked them. And the NFL’s advantage in tailoring their schemes, isolating team needs and fit, allows them to win at the margins when differences in evaluation don’t really matter.

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The fanatics who dig deep into draft analysis — those dedicated enough to follow the Consensus Big Board — often find that Day 2 is as exciting as Day 1. Teams pounce on the astounding value left on the board at the top of the second round and define their draft classes.

The headlines of draft classes are built on the first round, but the strength of classes are created in the second and third rounds. People remember the Vikings’ 2015 class not for Trae Waynes, but for Waynes, Eric Kendricks, Danielle Hunter and Stefon Diggs.

The Eagles built their 2024 Super Bowl team off of falling value. Landon Dickerson, Nakobe Dean and Cooper DeJean were all considered first-round talents who were drafted in Day 2, while other key players represented falling value — Dallas Goedert, Moro Ojomo and Josh Sweat all were rated as significant steals by the Consensus Big Board.

The 2017 New Orleans Saints draft class is remembered not for Marshon Lattimore but for Lattimore alongside Alvin Kamara, Marcus Williams, Ryan Ramczyk and Trey Hendrickson.

Conversely, the Chiefs’ 2017 class was outstanding in terms of total value because of Patrick Mahomes (and Kareem Hunt), but no one really calls it a good draft class so much as an outstanding pick.

So as teams turn draft classes from good picks into good hauls, who are the best candidates to do so? And can we always identify them?

Top Remaining Day 2 Players

Some of the top remaining players who were projected to go in the first round are easy to explain. Both Jermod McCoy and Avieon Terrell have injury concerns.

McCoy missed the 2025 season because of a torn ACL. Players who miss their final college season because of an ACL tear but are ranked in the mid-teens tend to go in the first round regardless — Todd Gurley, Kyle Fuller and Dominique Easley are good recent examples. In a way, Jeffery Simmons, who tore his ACL after the college season, would also count.

Instead, there are deeper concerns about McCoy. The need for a second surgery that would take him out of the 2026 season and a “cartilage defect” make his injury issues more serious — a problem genuinely different and distinct from his ACL tear, possibly a degenerative cartilage issue.

On top of that, his recovery timeline could have put him in play near the end of the season, but he still didn’t play in late November or early December, which warrants some caution.

Terrell, ranked slightly lower than McCoy, is a more interesting case. He has an ankle injury concern from 2024 (during the spring) and a quadriceps injury that forced him to miss a game in 2025, but was regarded as “durable” by Brugler in his draft guide. His size (5’10”) on top of his injury reaggravation — a hamstring injury that delayed his workouts with NFL teams — could have put some NFL teams off.

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Notably, Tyleik Williams injured his hamstring in the pre-draft process and was still drafted in the first round by the Detroit Lions.

Players like Emmanuel McNeil-Warren and Kayden McDonald are not particularly difficult to explain at this point; neither is considered an outstanding athletic performer at their position, and there usually needs to be some kind of athletic standout for a safety or nose tackle ranked in the mid-20s by the Consensus Board to go in the first round.

Examples include Budda Baker, Grant Delpit, Trevon Moehrig, Brian Branch, Landon Collins, Andrew Billings, A’Shawn Robinson and Eddie Goldman. These kinds of falls happen within the first round, too. Safeties Malik Hooker, Kyle Hamilton, Minka Fitzpatrick and Derwin James all fell substantially further in the draft than their Consensus Board rank would have suggested.

Denzel Boston was probably the victim of a relatively stacked receiver group; it is unlikely that many draft analysts would refer to this as a “strong” receiver class because the top-end talent doesn’t match the pre-draft evaluations we’ve seen for other receiver classes.

Those top-end receivers included (for better or worse) Corey Davis, Sammy Watkins, Odell Beckham Jr., Mike Evans, Ja’Marr Chase, Jaylen Waddle, DeVonta Smith, CeeDee Lamb, Garrett Wilson, Jerry Jeudy. This draft doesn’t seem to have any players who meet those lofty, top-ten ratings from experts. But they did have a lot of Top-32 receivers.

For Boston to have gone in the first round, he’d have needed to have been the sixth receiver off the board. Since the historic 2014 receiver class (only five were drafted in the first round then, too), we’ve only seen six or more receivers drafted four times out of 12, or 33 percent.

It would be difficult to make the argument that this class had the same regard as the meteoric 2020 class, the 2022 class or the 2024 class, which saw an astounding seven receivers drafted in the first round. You would be hard-pressed to find an analyst that favorably compared Carnell Tate, the top receiver off the board this year, to Marvin Harrison Jr., Malik Nabers or Rome Odunze.

There probably does not need to be much ink spilled over the first-round absences T.J. Parker or Colton Hood, who were just barely in the cut as Top-32 players on the Consensus Big Board. Parker’s 2024 was more productive than his 2025 (19.5 tackles for loss and 11.0 sacks, compared to 9.5 TFLs and 5.0 sacks) while Hood was just a one-year starter.

Refer a friend

Of these players and those at the top of the “second-round” grade group, the most interesting could be Terrell, Parker, C.J. Allen, Zion Young and D’Angelo Ponds. Terrell and Parker already have reasonably large variances in their rankings (generally, Terrell has ranked from 19th to 35th while Parker has ranked 25th to 39th) but so do Young and Ponds.

Young has off-field concerns. Brugler noted a DWI charge in December of 2025 (along with other vehicle violations) and an assault charge in 2023 for a post-game altercation with seven other Michigan State players.

Ponds is 5’8”.

Well, 5’8 5/8”. The shortest cornerbacks who have most recently logged at least ten starts are Darious Williams (5’9 5/8”), D.J. Reed (5’9 1/8”), Tavon Young (5’9 1/8”), Duke Shelley (5’8 5/8”) and Amik Robertson (5’8 3/8”). None of these players were drafted before Day 3, if they were drafted at all.

Ponds is a truly impressive player, but traits win the day in the NFL. Robertson generated 16 pass deflections and five interceptions in his final year of college, including two interceptions returned for a touchdown, and still couldn’t get drafted in Day 2. This was despite Robertson shutting down third-round pick Devin Duvernay and a few tall receivers, like 6’3” Obi Obialo, 6’3” De’Corian Clark and 6’5” Collin Johnson.

Nevertheless, Ponds’ performance was good enough for at least five analysts to rank him inside the top ten.

Does any of this matter?

How Often Do Day 2 “Steals” Become Good Players?

We know that the Consensus Board is generally pretty good at identifying talent and that it can compete with the NFL over a long time span when it comes to finding players that will make an impact.

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It is 1am on Wednesday morning, and I have just completed making the picks for my only mock draft of the cycle after three hours of manic research that has overwritten a fair amount of my eight months of slightly less manic theorizing.

It is now 11am on Wednesday morning. I fell asleep writing the blurbs for these picks, and naturally, I have been exposed to even more information that forced me to change a handful of picks.

But, considering I tied for 65th of 174 mock drafts submitted to The Huddle Report in 2025, my first year invited to the competition, such a cram session was necessary to inform some of the bigger swings I’ve taken in this mock.

If I look stupid on Thursday, that’s cool with me. It’s part of the fun of the cycle — which is important, because the lack of obvious top-end talent in this draft has mostly resulted in it feeling like the longest year of most analysts’ lives. But given most mock drafts are exercises in educated guessing anyhow, I feel as confident as one can feel roughly 30 hours before the draft begins on Thursday.

Note that all trades are based on the Rich Hill chart, which is what the mock draft simulator operated by Underdog uses.

Here are the picks.

1.1 Las Vegas Raiders: Indiana QB Fernando Mendoza

Thank you to the Raiders, Mendoza, and Tom Brady for making this by far the easiest selection of the night. Mendoza was really only challenged for QB1 by Oregon’s Dante Moore, who decided to head back to school and try his luck in 2027. Las Vegas will milk the new 8-minute timer, because the NFL tells them to, so don’t worry if you show up to your buddy’s draft party 10-15 minutes late on Thursday.

1.2 New York Jets: Ohio State EDGE Arvell Reese

Basically everyone on the national insider circuit has hammered David Bailey as the pick here under the pretense that Bailey is a safer player for a head coach that is surely on the hot seat after a disastrous first season. But almost every local reporter has remained steadfast that the pick is Reese, who does not have the low floor people seem to be making him out to have. It’s worth noting that the national media struggled to pin GM Darren Mougey down this time last year: most national reporters had the Jets selecting Tyler Warren rather than Armand Membou a season ago.

1.3 Arizona Cardinals: Texas Tech EDGE David Bailey

Rumors of a trade here have been centered around the Saints at 8 and Chiefs at 9, and I do believe that Arizona would love to trade out of this pick and collect an offensive lineman at more commensurate value a bit later. But Jeff Duncan of Nola.com, one of the Saints’ preeminent reporters, has said that a trade up seems unlikely. Sources connected to the Chiefs have suggested that a trade to 3 would be for Reese if the Jets select Bailey. I’m willing to buy that owner Michael Bidwill wants to take Jeremiyah Love to put butts in seats, but GM Monti Ossenfort has drafted a premium position with all 7 top 50 picks during his tenure with the Cardinals. Bailey is on the older side of those 7 players at 22.65 years old, but with no trade materializing here, I think Arizona would rather take Bailey than reach for Miami offensive lineman Francis Mauigoa or swerve off tendency and take Love.

1.4 Tennessee Titans: Notre Dame RB Jeremiyah Love

Tennessee seems to be hoping and praying that Arizona will take Love so that they can have whichever defensive player falls to 4. Recent smoke about Ohio State linebacker Sonny Styles and receiver Carnell Tate feel like complicating the picture for the sake of doing so more than legitimate interest. Getting what some see as the best player in the draft at a position that moves uniforms when you just did a brand refresh will surely be appealing to all parties involved in Nashville.

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1.5 New York Giants: Ohio State LB Sonny Styles

The Athletic beat reporter Dan Duggan has gotten 3 of the Giants’ first 4 picks correct in back-to-back years and has stayed on Styles despite recent movement towards his teammate, safety Caleb Downs. GM Joe Schoen, who admittedly has a questionable amount of power remaining after the team hired John Harbaugh as head coach, gravitates more towards elite athletes in the first round and Downs is usually described as a good-not-great athlete. Styles, on the other hand, was the fourth-most athletic linebacker in the RAS database.

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Welcome to the landing page for the Consensus Big Board for the 2026 NFL Draft. As often as possible, I’ve tried to provide it free, without subscription, to as many people as possible.

To that end, this piece is free to everyone, as is the data.

The insights generated from the board, which include analyses such as who the most polarizing players are in the draft, the difference between evaluators and forecasters, and post-draft team grades, will continue to be subscriber exclusives. This page will serve as a hub for those pieces, so you can find them if you feel the need.

• Why Use This Consensus Board?

• Using the Consensus Board to Find the Most Polarizing Players in the 2026 NFL Draft

• Forecasters and Evaluators: What’s the Difference and Why Does it Matter?

• The Consensus Big Board Grades the 2026 NFL Draft

• Ranking the 2026 UDFA Classes with the Consensus Big Board

From two years ago:

• Which Draft Analysts Predict the Draft the Best? Who’s Right on Players? And is the Consensus Board any Good?

Even if those pieces don’t strike you as appealing, I would urge a subscription to keep efforts like this running; this project takes dozens of hours every year and many of the boards in use are proprietary and behind paywalls.

What Makes This Consensus Board Different?

There are, by now, a half-dozen or so consensus boards out there. In some respects, they are more useful than this one – many of them have been running throughout the season, giving us a good barometer for a player’s stock and giving fans a genuine look at the players they might want to pay attention to during bowl games.

They also happen to be more focused, with particular emphasis on big-media boards, preventing unorthodox and uninformed rankings from polluting the system.

But I believe there’s a lot of value in this board, too. Every year, I’ve been able to gather anywhere between 50 and 90 big boards to provide a larger survey on the industry’s feelings about prospects in the draft.

For more on that topic, check out the piece below.

This year, we’ve gathered over 100 boards and anticipate having at least 115 by the time the draft rolls around.

We’ve been able to use the size of that data to leverage unique insights, like the ones described above. Using just ten boards wouldn’t give us a meaningful understanding of variance in player rankings and they don’t have the ability to split boards by type.

The boards used in this ranking are all updated in the month of April — some consensus boards take the average of all boards, including ones from the same analyst multiple times over many months — something I try to avoid.

On top of that, there’s also value in the approach I take to the board, which isn’t to average out the ranks across the industry but to average out the implied player values. There is admittedly more transparency in the approach that averages out player ranks across big boards, but it has the unfortunate side effect of suggesting that the difference between 145th and 147th is the same as the difference between 1st and 3rd.

In the NFL draft, that’s not how player ranks or player value works – the decision to rank a player first is a big decision; it signifies that teams should be willing to move heaven and earth to acquire that kind of player. That’s not the case at 145th.

Often, players ranked between 145th and 147th aren’t all that different. But the differences between the two are treated as the same in most consensus methods.

There’s also typically no accounting for player absences in boards. We can demonstrate this using an example, assuming we have 100 analysts ranking players 1 to 100. Not every analyst will rank the same 100 players and most leave players on the cutting room floor that others have decided to put in their top 100.

In this example, Player A is ranked by 50 boards as the 75th-best player in the draft and unranked on the other 50. Player B is ranked by all 100 boards as the 76th-best player. Most approaches to consensus boards will rank Player A as the better player, even though the average opinion on that player is that he is worse than Player B, not better.

This particular board, with its points-based averaging approach and varying penalties for absences on different-sized boards, avoids that problem, at least partially.

The data below is downloadable using a link at the bottom (labeled “Get the data”) and the 300 players are separated into three 100-player pages; an arrow in the upper-right can help you navigate between them. The table is also searchable and sortable.

Over the next week, the table will be updated to include ranks from two different groups of analysts (“Forecasters” and “Evaluators”) as well as the overall rank by consensus. At the moment, it only shows the consensus rank. It will also be updated in the coming days to include rank-adjusted variance, a score that tells us how polarizing the players in the draft are.

If you want a printable Google Sheet, click here (this will also be updated until the day of the draft).

Data Visualizations

Below we have a few data visualizations of the Consensus Big Board. Hopefully, these will help you understand some of the concepts we’ve been discussing, especially regarding variance. The first chart is a rank-adjusted variance chart, plotting players by their Consensus Big Board rank and their rank-adjusted variance, so you get a sense for how much disagreement the player drew relative to where they are on the big board.

The rank variance between Fernando Mendoza and Peter Woods is comparable when accounting for the fact that Mendoza ranks first and Woods ranks 26th, but the absolute range of rankings on Mendoza (generally first through seventh, with the outliers hitting 35th) is much narrower than the absolute range of rankings for Woods (generally 21st through 36th, though outliers hit between 3rd and 95th).

There’s another way to visualize the distribution of ranks, and this one makes no adjustment for rank. In order to prevent ourselves from focusing on outliers, we’ll use a box-and-whiskers plot; the middle line of the box is the median and the outside edges of the box are the 25th and 75th percentile values. The “whiskers” of the plot will give us the complete range of typical outcomes, with some dots representing extreme values outside of the typical range.

Below covers the top 100 players in the draft.

What if you wanted to know where positions might be scarce or abundant in the draft? We also have a positional distribution chart.

The Consensus Big Board project includes over 120 analysts in its annual player-ranking survey. With that, we can not only find out what the aggregate opinion the players in the 2026 NFL Draft, but also which players are most polarizing or how different approaches to NFL draft analysis produce different player rankings.

The broad disagreement about players is pretty easy to understand, and we've already broken this down.

But “different approach” might be tough to quantify. In this case, we mean that there are broadly two types of player rankings to explore. The decade-long experience we have in collating boards has led us to conclude that the two “types” of big boards can yield different insights into player evaluation.

The shorthand we’ve used is “forecaster” versus “evaluator” boards, though, like many things, the distinctions are a bit arbitrary, and there’s always been a fair degree of evaluating done by “forecasters” and a good amount of “forecasting” done by “evaluators.”

The Difference Between Forecasters and Evaluators?

The two categories have been characterized by others as “big media” versus “bloggers,” though that’s a bit antiquated. Certainly, there are independent media analysts with large audiences, but the “us vs. them” mentality is appealing.

It’s not entirely accurate, but it does carry some essential truths. Evaluators — “the little guys” — are draft analysts who primarily rely on publicly available information to craft their rankings and produce their analysis.

That doesn’t mean they’re incorporating public opinion into their rankings, but rather that they might use broadcast footage, college All-22 film, media reports on player character and injury flags and so on. The NFL Combine and public pro day reporting also provide them with useful data.

Forecasters — those employed by legacy media or with the kinds of resources afforded to legacy institutions — might be characterized as analysts who not only use public data but also difficult-to-access data, sometimes data meant to be reserved exclusively for NFL teams. That comes not just from sources inside front offices and agents but also through a network of relationships with scouts and college coaches across the country.

That means access not just to unique injury information and deeper character data but quite possibly tests like the psychological exams that teams conduct, cognitive assessments like the S2, as well as other physical checks, like conditioning, flexibility and VO2 max scores.

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As an example, there have been reports about Caleb Downs’ knee that have been publicly debated and refuted by Downs and his team, yet have persisted in the background of his evaluation. Less contentiously, there have been late-breaking reports that Jermod McCoy has injury concerns that could keep him out of the 2026 NFL season.

The degree to which these concerns might impact their NFL careers is unknown to everyone, but the best guesses belong to NFL teams that have had the ability to directly evaluate both players and have discussions with the medical and training personnel who worked with them.

Forecasters are generally analysts who might have access to the NFL’s information on those players and can use that to order their boards. This is true for injury information we have access to, like Downs and McCoy, as well as for players who might have injury concerns we don’t know about.

In addition, they may have more complete “character” information, such as how players are perceived by teammates, their leadership skills and the risk factors that might affect their locker-room presence or availability and so on.

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This is a double-edged sword, of course. Teams or agents may feed them this information for a particular reason or exaggerate the degree to which these concerns are legitimate. Forecasters need to be careful when assessing privately held knowledge, as they may be subject to draft-day smokescreens and the like.

They have to make judgment calls about what information is genuinely important and what might be a red herring. And they’re not always right.

The history of Consensus Big Boards has shown this distinction to be valid. Boards tagged as Forecaster boards have a very tight spread, and there’s a low variance in the rankings of players across that group year over year. Typically, when a player slides in the draft, Forecaster boards have that player lower than Evaluator boards — though that’s not always the case; last year, Forecasters were substantially higher on Shedeur Sanders than Evaluators were.

What Happens When They Disagree?

Surprisingly, we found that disagreement between the two boards is not particularly meaningful, even though one board is better at predicting the draft order — typically a quite powerful signal of player talent.

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In 2016, then-Washington State head coach Mike Leach simplified his approach to quarterback development for media members following a practice. As the co-founder of the Air Raid offense believed, accuracy was the most important trait a quarterback could possess.

“All of high school, he’s not accurate, now all of a sudden, you’re special, you’re going to make him accurate. After all of college, he isn’t accurate; you’re going to make him accurate. I haven’t seen that happen,” Leach said. “I’ve seen guys improve, but they just don’t become accurate. … You can go get the shortstop and teach him to play quarterback easier than you can make someone accurate.”

While Leach does have a point, he is partially responsible for some of the biggest reasons why quarterback evaluation in the NFL Draft process is a mixed bag.

In college football, the wild diversity of schemes makes it difficult to pinpoint what quarterbacks can actually do in pro-style offenses. While most NFL offenses will operate under center, college offenses are the byproduct of what a quarterback likes to do. As a result, offenses that run Air Raid concepts, like Leach, will have no issue spamming their core concepts, like Y-Cross, until the game is over.

While evaluating a quarterback based only on those concepts isn’t the best way to find your favorite team’s next franchise quarterback, there is often additional insight available from which routes or concepts quarterbacks pick as their favorite or believe they struggle with.

Take Y-Cross, for example. The concept prides itself on quick progressions, but the combination of a deep over and post on the playside means there are NFL throws against certain coverages. If a quarterback likes throwing the concept and can showcase a mastery of working through it with accuracy, there will be translatable traits throughout the play.

During the pre-draft cycle, Wide Left spoke to multiple top quarterbacks to find out which routes they enjoyed throwing and which concepts they believed they needed to work on heading into the NFL.

Texas Tech QB Behren Morton

Between his time at Eastland (TX) High School and Texas Tech, Behren Morton has spent more time in the Air Raid than any quarterback in this year’s draft.

Even with four offensive coordinators at Texas Tech, Morton hasn’t deviated from Air Raid concepts, with the Red Raiders running their entire offense out of shotgun under head coach Joey McGuire. Unsurprisingly, Morton’s favorite route concept to throw is a staple in any offense that runs concepts from the pass-heavy scheme.

“Y-Cross kind of beats everything. You can beat man; it can beat cover 2, cover 3, and cover 4. You can beat all-out blitz,” Morton said. “When I hear Y-Cross in the playbook, I’m fired up.”

While Pro Football Focus does not have Y-Cross as an available passing concept, it does credit Morton as 14-of-20 for 305 yards and two touchdowns on crossing routes in 2025.

Since Morton had full control of what’s called at the line of scrimmage, he doesn’t believe there was a route concept that gave him trouble. However, at the East-West Shrine Bowl, Morton had to adjust to playing at a slower pace than he was used to in college.

“I’ve never huddled in my career. In high school, I ran the Air Raid. I’ve had four different coordinators at Texas Tech; we were all in Air Raid, taking victory formation [as] shotgun snaps, never under center,” Morton told Wide Left during Shrine Bowl. “This week has been awesome as far as getting to go under center and getting to know we don’t have to play at a two-minute pace, we can slow things down, and we can really operate.”

Texas Tech LB Jacob Rodriguez (former Virginia quarterback)

Before he switched to defense, Rodriguez was a standout quarterback at Rider High School in Wichita Falls, TX, impressing even his future college teammates with his ability to throw the ball.

“He really threw the deep ball well. He was really powerful, obviously, as you know, but he could really spin it. He was a dual-threat kind of guy,” said Morton. “My roommate at Texas Tech was his tight end, so I went to watch him in the fourth round when they were playing in the playoffs. I was like, ‘This dude is legit.’ He can spin it, and he can get the ball out quick, but he can also put his face to your chest and run you over.”

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One of the wonderful elements of aggregating over 100 big boards is the ability to figure out which players are drawing the biggest disagreements across all of the analysts, not something that is as easy to figure out with 10-12 player rankings. The backlog — over a decade — of data allows us to also perform some contextual calculations that can smooth out our process and give us more granular results.

Because we have this treasure trove of data, I’ve been able to modify the approach to our “polarizing players” calculation that makes the tuning process a bit more accurate.

Often, players who provoke the most discussion can seem like the most polarizing prospect in the draft, but are not. This year, for example, the most polemic discussions seem to surround Ruben Bain Jr., Makai Lemon and Blake Miller. But analysts generally don’t disagree all that much about where those players should slot on their boards.

As an example, an early version of the Consensus Big Board in 2014 found that Jadeveon Clowney, who was subject to constant questions about his work ethic and production, was near-universally considered the top prospect in the draft. He was divisive in discourse, but analysts ultimately did not care about narrative fodder – he was one of the least polarizing players in the draft.

This has been the case for a number of top prospects over the years, though not quite as emphatically so as with the Clowney example. Divisive conversations surrounding Ed Oliver, Jamal Adams, Jerry Jeudy, Will Fuller and DJ Moore didn’t materialize into a real divergence in rankings.

On the other hand, some players drew dramatic disagreements between analysts without much hot-take style press on how they’d fail or succeed. These include players like Jonathan Allen, Keanu Neal, John Ross, Austin Jackson, Jamin Davis and Charles Harris.

Last year, we had an unusually polarizing top-32, with Cam Ward, Tyler Warren, Will Johnson, Tetairoa McMillan, Jalon Walker, Malakai Starks, Mykel Williams, Shedeur Sanders and Nick Emmanwori appearing as polarizing members of the class — in a typical class, we see four players from the top 32 hit the most polarizing players list, not nine.

Many of those players were the ones we saw leading discussions about their true talent level, meaning the discourse matched the reality of analyst rankings. But players like Will Campbell — despite endless conversation about their NFL role and fit — didn’t actually draw too much analyst disagreement. So too with Travis Hunter, who was a near universally ranked number one player despite conversation about his best NFL position.

Does It Matter if a Player is Polarizing?

Two years ago, we evaluated whether more polarizing players were set up to succeed or fail more often than their less-polarizing peers with similar consensus ranks.

We’re reworking that list with our new historically-adjusted formula and adding players form the 2022 and 2023 NFL drafts to get a better sense of what it means when a player is more polarizing than their peers.

The first step, of course, is to figure out the variance in rankings across analysts. But there’s a bit of an issue. Players ranked in the 80s or 120s are more similar in value than players ranked in the top five or top 30.

Small differences in evaluation will result in larger differences in rank for players further down the board.

Analysts know that they are disagreeing sharply with one another when they say a player is not worthy of a top-five pick and instead worth a top-ten pick — but not when they say that a Day 3 player should be just barely in or out of the Top 100.

So, we introduce a modifier to the initially calculated variance that, over multiple drafts, functionally reduces the correlation of “rank” and raw variance to zero.

The output number is basically meaningless, so I wanted to transform it into something pretty recognizable. As always, I’ve been inspired by the analysts at Pro-Football-Reference, who themselves took inspiration from baseball.

In their era-adjusted “index” scores for variance statistics, they reproduce the method that we get for OPS+ and other “plus”-type stats from baseball. Essentially, 100 is average, while every 15 “points” is one standard deviation.

Those unfortunately familiar with IQ scores might recognize this system – it’s essentially the same.

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The Most Polarizing Players of Past Drafts

With all of that context in mind, we can check out the most polarizing players from the 2016 to 2023 drafts.

There are a few observations we can make from this list. The first is that reaches seem much more likely with extremely polarizing players, as one might expect. It also seems that, with these polarizing players, the NFL does a better job of assessing overall talent than the consensus board.

For players where disagreement was substantial (Josh Allen, Carson Wentz, A’Shawn Robinson, Dalvin Cook, Daniel Jones, Anthony Richardson and Sam Darnold), teams generally reached on the player, though it should be noted that the vast majority of these players were quarterbacks, which teams are generally justified reaching on versus the consensus board.

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Wide Left will be publishing its Consensus Big Board soon, aggregating data from over 100 analysts. That piece, like this one, will be free to all readers.

Back in 2015, when I started the Consensus Big Board project, there weren’t many resources that gathered together the accumulated wisdom from draft watchers. Over ten years later, that’s changed.

There are about a dozen places to find a consensus board, including multiple former employers of mine, as well as more open fora like Reddit or social media platforms. On top of that, we have access to other methods for aggregating opinions on player prospects in the draft, including the aggregated mock positions from GrindingTheMocks and the NFL Mock Draft Database.

Is there any serious difference between them?

To some extent, we explored this two years ago when discussing the different consensus boards.

Why come to Wide Left when all of these other options are available?

I wanted to answer that question with some rigor, so I contacted Benjamin Robinson, who runs Grinding the Mocks, and we worked together to test the boards. What I found might not be surprising. But first, a primer on how these boards are constructed.

Why Are These Rankings Different?

There are essentially four categories of player rankings I’ll be looking at: the limited-rank-average model employed by most consensus boards across the web, the mock draft aggregation produced by Robinson, the expanded-value-average model for Wide Left’s board, and the blended board/mock model employed by the NFL Mock Draft Database.

Most consensus boards take rankings from 10 to 16 or so analysts and average the ranks. So, Fernando Mendoza might be ranked {1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8} by 15 boards, his average rank would be 3.27. Arvell Reese might be ranked {1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4 and 5} for an average rank of 2.53, so he would be ahead of Mendoza. In this exercise, Jeremiyah Love ranks {1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5 and 6} with an average of 2.80.

So, an averaging approach would have those players rank Reese first, Love second and Mendoza third. Easy to understand, intuitive, and gets the broad picture across easily.

That might tell us who experts think are the best players in the draft, but it doesn’t tell us very much about where those players might go.

Grinding the Mocks focuses primarily on mock draft data (with a small amount of big board data) to construct a regression model that is tuned to better reflect expected player position. As the model gets more robust, it can be used to construct probability ranges for players.

This year, Robinson’s data projects Mendoza to go first (an “expected draft position” of 1.3), Reese to go (generally) second (EDP of 3.0) and Love to go fourth (EDP of 4.7).

Robinson’s model weighs more recent and more accurate mock drafts heavily, a method meant to take advantage of the most up-to-date information we’ve learned about teams or prospects, which may better tell us what might happen on draft day.

NFL Mock Draft Database’s “Consensus Board” also focuses on grabbing data from mock drafts as well as big boards, using over 1,000 mocks and nearly 150 big boards gathered throughout the year to produce a composite ranking that blends the two approaches.

There is also a decay function in the NFL MDDB, with no boards over four months old included in the calculation at any time and with recency weighting, as with Robinson’s approach.

Wide Left’s approach ignores mock drafts and assigns values to each player based on their rank from each analyst. Some consensus boards (like the Athletic’s) do the same, assigning 100 points for the top-ranked player on a board, 99 points for the second-ranked player and so on.

The value calculation Wide Left uses is modeled after various trade charts (such as the Jimmy Johnson, Rich Hill, Fitzgerald-Spielberger, and Chase Stuart charts), assigning significant value to the first overall rank and much less to the 100th-ranked player.

This way, the differences between players are better captured; assigning a player a top-ten rank suggests that the player is much more talented than the 32nd-ranked player, but assigning a player a rank of 101st is not that different from designating them as the 132nd-ranked player.

A logarithmic decline in value can capture changes in rank differences in a way that the average rank value cannot. In order to reduce the impact of outliers, Wide Left also uses the “interquartile mean” of all the values assigned by each analyst.

That means tossing out the values in the top and bottom 25 percent of the range and averaging the middle 50 percent. Then, to break ties, the outliers are reintroduced with a much lower weight.

In the above example, with Reese, Love and Mendoza — where Reese ranks first, Love second and Mendoza third by a simple average — Mendoza finds himself second, not third, because his outlier ranks of 7 and 8 are thrown out.

Not only that, the value of having that many first-overall ranks exceeds the value of the number of second-overall ranks Love receives.

Later in the draft, we find quite a few players ranked by some boards and not others. How consensus approaches deal with absent players in the rankings matters.

Different top 100s will have a different spread of players, typically encompassing a universe of 120-140 players.

A good way to understand the impact of failing to account for player absences in boards is a simple example. Let’s assume we have 100 analysts ranking players 1 to 100. We know that not every analyst will rank the same 100 players; most leave players on the cutting room floor who others have included in their top 100.

In this example, Player A is ranked by 30 boards as the 75th-best player in the draft and is unranked on the other 70 boards. Player B is ranked by all 100 boards as the 76th-best player. Most approaches to consensus boards will rank Player A as the better player, even though the average opinion on that player is that he is worse than Player B, not better.

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Wide Left’s consensus board, with its points-based averaging approach and varying penalties for absences on different-sized boards, avoids that problem (at least partially). There is a bigger penalty to a player left off of a 500-player board than off of a 100-player board, and the value calculations reflect that clearly expressed preference from the analysts.

There is also a sample advantage when using 80-plus boards over 12-16 boards and it seems to play out when we look at outcomes.

OK, So Which Board is Better?

Trying to determine which board is better depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. In general, we rank players for two reasons: 1) to figure out where they’ll go in the draft or when they will no longer be available and 2) to figure out which players in the draft are most likely to succeed.

Predicting the Draft

For that first exercise, we can determine the average pick distance each board has from the NFL’s actual selections. For the averaging consensus board, I used the rankings I’ve gathered from legacy media and well-read draft analysts over the years, picking between 12 and 16 boards, depending on which ones were available. This meant grabbing the rankings from CBS Sports, The Athletic, various NFL.com boards, ESPN and so on.

Grinding the Mocks does the best job of giving us insight into where a player will fall in the draft. Using that as a guide to determine whether a team was right to trade up or to take a shot and reach instead of trading down seems like an appropriate use case.

The NFL Mock Draft Database, despite using a very similar dataset, is an entire pick or more off from the Grinding the Mock’s approach throughout the top 100, which is a bit of a surprise. Nevertheless, it significantly outperforms Wide Left’s consensus board and the typical average-rank consensus board we see on the web.

The fact that the Wide Left consensus board outperforms the typical consensus board in the first round by a good margin is an interesting insight, though that advantage disappears heading into the second round or the top 100.

Predicting Player Outcomes

But, which should we use if we want to figure out which players are best. Given how good the NFL is at rank-ordering players through the draft selection process, wouldn’t the board best at predicting how the draft will fall be the board we want to use for that exercise?

Not necessarily.

The NFL draft market isn’t very liquid; teams don’t organize optimally to make sure that player value, need, and resources all line up. A team that needs a quarterback is going to reach, and trades are pretty rare. Teams, who are risk averse, would rather stay put and make a selection than move up or down the draft until there’s significant reason to move.

Using a combination of player grades, postseason honors, production and contract value, I’ve put together a crude ranking system to order the players from each draft class. It works alright; Dak Prescott ranks first from the 2016 draft class, followed by Jared Goff, Carson Wentz and then Jalen Ramsey – in part because quarterbacks are worth so much more than other positions.

Following that are Joe Thuney, Tyreek Hill and Hunter Henry. In 2017, the highest-ranked players are Patrick Mahomes, Deshaun Watson, George Kittle and Marlon Humphrey. In 2018, it’s Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Baker Mayfield, Mark Andrews, Quenton Nelson, Dallas Goedert and Jaire Alexander.

These rankings are by no means perfect, but they’re close enough to perform an analysis on how rank-ordering worked for boards and the NFL. Because we don’t have as much information on the performance of players from the 2024 and 2025 draft classes, they’ve been excluded.

Draft values and contract values both tend to organize themselves with exponentially increasing or decreasing values, so after broadly rank-ordering the players from the drafts, we can assign draft value to them.

That way, we can compare the implied value from the big boards against the produced value of the players who were selected and treat them like the logarithmic trade values used in the Wide Left consensus board rankings.

From there, we can see how close each board approach was to determining a player’s long-term outcome value.

In terms of projecting player outcomes, it doesn’t look particularly close; the Wide Left Consensus Big Board vastly outperforms the mock draft database and the average ranking approach in the first round, second round and beyond. The Grinding the Mocks database, perhaps by virtue of getting closer to NFL draft selections, comes in second in each of those value buckets.

The expansive nature of the Wide Left Consensus Board really shines on Day 3, where having data on over 800 players organized by perceived talent allows for more granular grading on players who end up going on Day 3.

Which aggregate board should you choose? It depends on what you’re looking for.

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[Editor’s Note: We asked James Foster to produce a mock draft with the draft just around the corner. In this draft, Foster projects five trades and eight defensive backs to go in the first round. Wide Left will have some of the most unique draft coverage in the NFL media world this year and Foster’s incredible, in-depth insights will be part of it]

With ten days left until the draft, these are my final predictions for the first round.

1. Las Vegas Raiders — QB Fernando Mendoza, Indiana

There haven’t been any indications that the Raiders are considering other options here. Mendoza is a sharpshooter with prototypical size and underrated athleticism. He made smart decisions and got the ball out on time in Indiana’s RPO-heavy scheme, but is unproven attacking the middle of the field and working to his second read from within the pocket.

2. New York Jets — EDGE/LB Arvell Reese, Ohio State

David Bailey currently seems like the chalk pick, but his questionable run support and redundancy with Will McDonald IV makes Arvell Reese a better fit.

I have Reese graded as an off-ball linebacker, but it’s much more likely that he plays edge in the NFL. In just 960 career snaps, Reese showed enough to earn first round grades at two positions. He’s an explosive athlete with a shredded physique - he looks like he was built in a lab to set the edge, take on pullers, or flatten blockers with speed-to-power.

In a very limited sample of pass-rushing snaps, he won with a long arm (3), cross-chop (2), bull rush (1), and power-to-speed (1), but 22/27 of his pressures and all eight of his sacks came within the first eight games of the year. While his resume is sparse compared to most first-round edge defenders, he wasn’t even practicing at that position in college. In a recent interview with ESPN’s Benjamin Solak, Reese revealed that he didn’t know the name of a cross-chop he won with in Week 10. It’s easy to imagine him improving dramatically with a single offseason of technical work.

3. Arizona Cardinals — EDGE David Bailey, Texas Tech

The Cardinals are in a tough spot and should be looking to trade down, but I couldn’t find any partners that made sense.

David Bailey is a top-tier linear athlete with the first step, arc speed, and hand usage to dominate the outside track. His success rate plummets when he doesn’t win immediately, however, as he struggles to bend through contact and lacks the upper-body strength and torque to break his opponent’s grip and transition to counters. Bailey’s fastball is overwhelming, but he’ll need to continue to develop his long-arm to maintain his snap-to-snap impact vs. NFL tackles.

4. Tennessee Titans — RB Jeremiyah Love, Notre Dame

Tennessee had just 35 explosive (1+ EPA) runs last year, which ranked 31st in the NFL. With the top two edge rushers off the board, they take Jeremiyah Love, upgrading the offense and avoiding the steep dropoff between RB1 and RB2.

Love has the patience, elusiveness, and breakaway speed to flip the field in one play. His average power through contact might reduce his efficiency as a singles and doubles hitter, but we haven’t seen a homerun threat of this caliber since Jahmyr Gibbs. In 2025, Love expanded his route tree and showed more composure and physicality in pass protection, proving himself as a three-down back.

5. New York Giants — LB Sonny Styles, Ohio State

The Giants take Sonny Styles, my highest-graded player in the 2026 class. Styles has the range and coverage versatility of a converted safety, and the instincts and block-shedding ability of a lifelong linebacker. He rarely misses tackles or run fits and processes at remarkable speeds for a two-year starter.

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Episode Notes:

• Check out Alex Katson’s piece on pro days

• I recently wrote about which pro days stood out to me

• We have pretty good evidence that early declarations are more talented and perform better in the NFL than late declarations/those who’ve run out of eligibility, though the evidence typically represents itself through age

• Here’s a piece on Ty Cobb’s alleged racism

• The draft shut down Pittsburgh-area schools

Follow us on Twitter / Bluesky

• Arif - @ArifHasanNFL / @arif.bsky.social

• James - @bigmono / @norsecodpocast.bsky.social

• Alex - @alexkatson / @katson.bsky.social

To listen to more, this is the link to that iTunes feed. If you can’t for whatever reason subscribe via iTunes, subscribe to via our RSS feed, which should support the RSS reader or podcast organizer of your choice. You can still leave a review even if you can’t subscribe via iTunes because it’s easy to create an AppleID. We also have a YouTube channel. Our podcasts are automatically uploaded there.

You can visit our shop here. Buy a onesie? Maybe a wiggler sticker?

But we also have a Patreon and that should make it even easier to support the best podcast for your Minnesota Vikings. We have a discord just for our Patreon supporters, along with special edition episodes. Check it out here. If you wanted to donate via Paypal instead of Patreon, head to this link.

And if you want something to show off your support of the show, buy our merch! We have multiple designs. Please do not buy a shower curtain.

Once again, contact me at arifmhasan (at) gmail dot com or the podcast at NorseCodePodcast (at) gmail dot com. Follow us on twitter at @NorseCodeDN or just me @ArifHasanNFL

The college pro day circuit has essentially concluded; by the end of March, 1700 players had completed at least one pro day workout, with more adding their pro days to the mix in early April. With that, we have more data on previously undiscovered gems.

The problem is that pro day workouts are often difficult to parse — not just because the workouts offer variable benefits depending on context, but also because pro days themselves have been mystified by the NFL's characteristically opaque nature.

Last year, Wide Left’s Alex Katson broke down how pro days actually operate and debunked a number of myths and misconceptions about them.

For this piece, I wanted to work with the research I had done several years ago about which workouts matter the most for individual positions instead of using composite athletic measures.

I have issues with measures like Relative Athletic Score, which I outlined two years ago. In that piece, I discussed preferring position-specific measures, disliked the compressing nature of eliteness (or lack-of-eliteness) in RAS, how size is accounted for and more.

I’ve done some back-of-the-envelope modeling to work on producing a position-specific measure, and though it isn’t perfect, it might be more helpful. From that piece:

Over the past 15 years, I’ve maintained a database of workout scores from pro days and the NFL Combine and have tested them against NFL outcomes. These are tested both in raw form and in size-adjusted form – it turns out that the raw 40-yard dash matters at cornerback, but size-adjusted 40-yard dash matters at tight end.

The testing hasn’t been updated in the past several years, so while it might over-index for cornerbacks with length or trend towards other NFL fads from a few years ago, it still represents something a bit more precise than composite athletic scores.

I’ve also been able to control for role a little bit. There are two sets of athletic scores at defensive tackle – one for larger DTs, presumed to be nose tackles and one for smaller DTs, presumed to be three-techniques – three sets of tests for receivers that depend on height and separate tests at center, guard and tackle.

This way, we can avoid being impressed by athletes who specialize in skills that have little to do with their projected NFL job. RAS stars like Damiere Byrd and Dri Archer didn’t test well in position-specific scoring while average RAS athletes like Sidney Rice and Malcolm Jenkins are recognized for the high-level positional athletes they are.

Terence Steele had a high RAS but low position scoring while Cordy Glenn was the opposite.

So, with that in mind, and about 2,000 player workouts to account for after ingesting April data and the NFL Combine, who stood out?

Table of Contents:

• Offense

  • Quarterback

  • Wide Receiver

  • Running Back

  • Tight End

  • Offensive Tackle

  • Guard

  • Center

• Defense

  • Defensive Tackle

  • Edge Rusher

  • Linebacker

  • Cornerback

  • Safety

Offense

Quarterback

I’ve not done any testing for the relationship between athleticism and performance at quarterback, so there’s no model to go off of. Instead, we can identify the most impressive all-around athlete at the position based on pro day testing. That happened to be Jeff Sims from Arizona State (628^th on the Consensus Big Board). His uncle, Mike Sims-Walker, was a receiver for the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Sims ran a 4.50 40-yard dash and complemented that with a 10’11” broad jump, demonstrating his explosiveness. Doing so at 6’4” and 222 pounds is impressive, though it would have been nice to get agility measurements, too. In his final year at Arizona State, he only started in the second half of the season after starter Sam Leavitt suffered a season-ending foot injury. But in those seven games, he earned over 500 yards rushing.

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He’s not had meaningful snaps in college football, so he’s not going to be a quarterback at the next level. But it wouldn’t be surprising if an NFL team looked at him as a receiver or tight end.

Honorable Mention: Gavin Wimsatt, Jacksonville State

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Mason Reiger’s second pinned post on Instagram is captioned “Day 281: My story.”

The minute-long video captures the Wisconsin edge rusher’s journey from a walk-on at Louisville in 2020 to an impact player with the Badgers, with the caption ending: “Let me be an example of light being at the end of the tunnel!!!”

In 2006, Tajikistan opened the Iranian-built Anzob Tunnel, constructed to connect the two largest cities in the country — Dushanbe, the nation’s capital, and Khujand. The two cities had been cut off from each other for most of the previous winter due to harsh conditions across the Hisar mountain range and the closure of the original path between the cities, built through Uzbekistan during the Soviet era. But it was part of the larger Tajik-Uzbek border tensions after the Soviet Union collapsed.

The tunnel was dangerous — until 2017, it was not paved, lit or ventilated, and it remains unclear whether or not it is ventilated as of this writing. Locals told stories of people dying of carbon monoxide poisoning due to traffic jams away from the only fan, located somewhere in the middle of the tunnel. Until the tunnel was closed in June 2015 for repairs and improvements, travelers had to sign a waiver acknowledging hazards such as flooding and smog inside the tunnel.

A 2007 article by David Trilling of Eurasianet notes water jetting from the sides of the rock walls and from ceiling stalactites, and reaffirms the tales of deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning. Trilling notes that “if falling rocks were the only problem, the tunnel would be in good shape.”

When the tunnel opened in 2006, however, Tajikistan Deputy Prime Minister Asadullo Gulomov said at the ceremony that President Emomali Rahmon had once stated the Tajiks would build the tunnel “with our hands and teeth” if they did not have the requisite equipment.

“Good intentions are half the battle,” Rahmon said, according to Gulomov.

Hands and Teeth

Reiger begins the story of his six-year college career by saying that “it’s been quite a ride, and I’ve loved every bit of it.” A Division II prospect coming out of Conant High School in River Grove, Illinois, Reiger told Wide Left that “if I was going to play college football, I was going to play at the highest level. I didn’t want to look back one day when I’m 40, 50 years old with my kids and be like, ‘I wonder if I could have played at [the] Power 5 level.’”

Conant has produced four NFL players to date: 1984 UDFA wide receiver Tim Tyrrell, 1986 UDFA safety Creig Federico, 2004 UDFA quarterback Russ Michna and 2011 UDFA wide receiver Andre Holmes. None played major college football — Tyrrell played at Northern Illinois, Federico at Illinois State, Michna at Western Illinois and Holmes at Hillsdale.

Reiger came into Louisville knowing he was perceived to be a better fit for that lower caliber of school, telling Wide Left that “I saw some guys that play my position, play other positions, that I’m just like, ‘Wow, I am not ready for this level of football yet.’”

After two seasons and a third offseason program, the Illinois native found himself on scholarship at Louisville. His strong 2023 campaign, during which he had five sacks and a forced fumble, drew the attention of Wide Left draft analyst Devin Jackson:

A few of the reps highlighted by Jackson came in Louisville’s 2023 matchup against Notre Dame, which featured 2024 No. 5 overall pick Joe Alt at left tackle and second-rounder Blake Fisher at right tackle. Reiger had two sacks and a forced fumble in that game, a 33-20 upset win that proved to be one of the highlights of the Cardinals’ ACC Championship runner-up season.

“That was, on paper, my highest graded game of my career,” Reiger told Wide Left. “I think [that] goes hand in hand with that confidence, because at the time, I knew I was a good player, but I didn’t know how good I could really be and how I could take my game to the next level. A couple of those plays, I realized I could do this at a high level.”

Reiger missed the 2024 season after an offseason knee injury sidelined him for the year. By the time he suited up again, this time in Madison, in a different shade of red, the pass rusher had undergone six operations on the same right knee to get himself back into playing condition.

Louisville told Reiger to medically retire after the injury, but he wasn’t ready to give up on the chase just yet.

“At any given point, none of these players, me included, knows when our last snap of football is going to be. Having it taken away from me against my will just really puts it in perspective. Imagine your last play ever, and you weren’t giving 100% of your effort, and now you have to live with that for the rest of your life, the game that you say you loved,” Reiger told Wide Left. “I really do, I love football, since I was five years old, the first year I put pads on. For me to just have another opportunity to play, I’m going to give it everything I have, because one day when I don’t have football, I’m gonna look back and I’m gonna know that I was able to give everything that I have.”

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Wisconsin took a flier on Reiger in the transfer portal after he decided to pursue other opportunities, but the Badgers still had to wait for their new pass rusher to undergo a few more cleanup procedures on his knee before they could see what he could do. Once they did, head coach Luke Fickell told Wisconsin media that Reiger was a player the coaching staff had to “save from himself” sometimes — he was so relentless in practice that Wisconsin was worried he’d overextend himself.

“I definitely can say it comes from my parents, two of the hardest-working people I know to date,” Reiger told Wide Left of his work ethic. “I always tell people I had the privilege of growing up in a two-parent household. [My older brother and I] always pushed each other, and now I’m doing the same thing for my younger brother as well, and just to have a support system like that that’s always demanding the most out of you and you to become the best version of yourself, I think that was just a little bit of the spark to what I was going to do.”

Wisconsin drew the best version out of him. Reiger logged another five sacks and 11 more total tackles than he had in 2023 during his senior season with the Badgers, despite a nearly 20-month layover between his last game at Louisville and his first game in Madison.

“[Wisconsin] absolutely [demanded] a leadership role from me, and also myself, demanding that from me as well, to just really maximize my abilities as a player. You go out there, and you’re more vocal, and you push other guys, “Reiger told Wide Left when asked how playing for the Badgers elevated his game.

“In turn, you feel that pressure on you, but pressure is a privilege, and to have that confidence in yourself, to be able to help other guys out, get them lined up, and know that you’ve prepared enough to be confident and comfortable in your role as well is something that’s pushed me. I believe that a confident player is a better player at the end of the day. You go through a series, and you’re playing with confidence, you get into that flow state, and you’re finding more success, you’re making more plays.”

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The Vikings might have grabbed the best value in free agency, taking a quarterback whose open-market value might be north of $30 million for the veteran’s minimum, an odd quirk of how guaranteed money works in most NFL contracts.

Many might quibble at that valuation — something worth covering in detail — but the implications of the move are clear. As much as the Vikings have refused to commit to naming a starter this early into the offseason, the expectation from the local beat and the national media is that Murray will start for the Vikings in the 2026 season without much of a real competition.

This isn’t the end of the J.J. McCarthy story, but it is a delay. The Vikings have McCarthy under a cheap contract through 2027 and have the opportunity to secure him — at a heftier price — into 2028, should they choose to. For now, he’s an unseasoned backup and may be joined by another before camp breaks in late July.

It is difficult to argue that this is anything but a good move for the franchise, assuming their goal this offseason is to maximize wins in 2026.

Wait, Did You Say $30 Million? How Good is Kyler Murray?

It might seem odd to think of Kyler Murray, a quarterback injured and then benched by his previous team, as a quarterback who could earn $30 million — Sam Darnold, after all, put together a much better season and was never cut by the Vikings before earning $33.5 million in Seattle in the offseason before winning the Super Bowl.

But we’re also not too far removed from an offseason where Derek Carr, cut by the Raiders, signed a contract with the Saints for $37.5 million per year. By percentage of cap at signing, $30 million now (10.0 percent of the cap) would be equivalent to Case Keenum’s contract with the Broncos in 2018 ($18 million AAV), Teddy Bridgewater’s 2020 contract with the Panthers ($21 million AAV) and Nick Foles’ 2019 contract with the Chicago Bears ($22 million AAV).

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If we adjust EPA per-dropback rankings for a 35-quarterback comparison set each year, Murray has ranked 23rd, 21st, 12th, 21st, 21st, 14th, and 17th in the NFL. By contrast, McCarthy’s lone season saw him rank 34th, with an unusual end-of-season stretch allowing him to place just ahead of Cam Ward after bottoming out as one of the worst quarterbacks we’ve ever seen through five starts.

When canvassing subjective quarterback rankings lists, like those from the Ringer and NFL.com, Kyler found himself ranked in the top ten a few times (seventh, eighth, or ninth at least once by at least one organization) and regularly ranked in the top fifteen.

By PFF grade, he has ranked between 3rd (2021) and 23rd (2022), averaging a rank of 15.7 since 2020.

The preseason poll of executives conducted by The Athletic reveals that NFL executives have always valued Murray — he’s consistently ranked between 12th (2021) and 17th (2024), with an average rank of 14th since 2020.

Because Murray was benched for Jacoby Brissett and missed time due to injury in 2025, it’s been easy to dismiss him as an overrated player, a process that has occurred so often in media circles that he has looped around to an underrated position.

When discussing Murray, it’s been easy for me to say he’s comfortably a top 20 quarterback who has the ability to challenge for top 12 position, but that argument has received significant pushback. Evaluating it in more detail, it doesn’t seem that far-fetched.

Of the 50 executives and coaches that Athletic author Mike Sando polled, 17 placed Murray in the second tier, a tier containing Jayden Daniels, Justin Herbert, Jared Goff, C.J. Stroud, Jalen Hurts, Baker Mayfield, Dak Prescott, Jordan Love and Brock Purdy. Ahead of the 2025 season, ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler tasked NFL personnel with completing a similar ballot, asking executives and coaches to rank their top ten at various positions. Murray received votes as a top ten player.

Given that 16 quarterbacks make at least $30 million per year heading into 2026, it’s easy to argue Murray is in that range; he is comfortably a “good” quarterback being paid backup money.

Does He Fit the Offense?

At some level, the question of whether Murray fits with what the Vikings want to do is not that relevant to whether it was a good signing. They’ve almost certainly cheaply improved their offensive production without long-term commitment.

But we’ve seen the range of Murray outcomes; are the Vikings improving by default and getting a bottom-third quarterback who can — at best — steer the ship while the defense takes over, or are they getting a quarterback who can knock on the door of top-ten consideration?

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But for those who want to be notified by newsletter when a new podcast is posted or want to subscribe internal to the Substack app, this option now exists with its own RSS feed.

Episode Notes:

• I’ve got a new podcast with Luke Braun — Locked on Vikings After Dark. Most recent episode here

• Great piece from Alec Lewis in The Athletic about how this dynamic impacts J.J. McCarthy

• This is that video from Chase Daniel I criticized

• The New York Times article the quote I read about watching film comes from

• The Vikings opted against signing Tua Tagovailoa, who never seemed to be an option for them anyway. Regardless, Luke Braun wrote about Tagovailoa’s story and why it’s hard to project him returning to his heights

Follow us on Twitter / Bluesky

• Arif - @ArifHasanNFL / @arif.bsky.social

• James - @bigmono / @norsecodpocast.bsky.social

To listen to more, this is the link to that iTunes feed. If you can’t for whatever reason subscribe via iTunes, subscribe to via our RSS feed, which should support the RSS reader or podcast organizer of your choice. You can still leave a review even if you can’t subscribe via iTunes because it’s easy to create an AppleID. We also have a YouTube channel. Our podcasts are automatically uploaded there.

You can visit our shop here. Buy a onesie? Maybe a wiggler sticker?

But we also have a Patreon and that should make it even easier to support the best podcast for your Minnesota Vikings. We have a discord just for our Patreon supporters, along with special edition episodes. Check it out here. If you wanted to donate via Paypal instead of Patreon, head to this link.

And if you want something to show off your support of the show, buy our merch! We have multiple designs. Please do not buy a shower curtain.

Once again, contact me at arifmhasan (at) gmail dot com or the podcast at NorseCodePodcast (at) gmail dot com. Follow us on twitter at @NorseCodeDN or just me @ArifHasanNFL

Imagine yourself in Tua Tagovailoa’s shoes.

It’s Jan. 8, 2018. You’re on the field at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, playing in the College Football Playoff National Championship against the Georgia Bulldogs.

You weren’t supposed to be here. As Jalen Hurts’ backup, you were supposed to support from the sidelines. But Hurts struggled. After a scoreless first half with just 21 passing yards, coach put you in.

You’ve played before, but it was mop-up duty in blowout wins. This is the first meaningful action of your collegiate career. You’re down 13-0 in a hostile stadium, facing down a Georgia roster littered with NFL talent. You are 19 years old.

But you found a rhythm. You came back to tie the game and send it into overtime. Georgia scored a field goal on the first possession, so a touchdown will win it.

On first down, disaster.

It’s your fault. You could have thrown a high floater to the running back, taken a chance downfield, or just eaten the sack. Anything but running backwards. Now, even a game-tying field goal is in question.

What do you do when you screw up? How do you react? Is it easy to admit, to learn from? Does it affect the rest of your day? Do you wallow in self-pity, or ignore it and move on without skipping a beat?

For Tua, it’s familiar territory. Comfortable, even.

Greek tragedies, like those of Sophocles or Euripides, contain moments like this before the inevitable

Tagovailoa’s story is not complete. It is trending the way of these Greek tragedies, however. This victory was a long time ago. He will see more triumphs. But throughout that time, the seeds of his downfall were sown.

How To Tell A Story Like Sophocles

Classically, tragedies have three main factors: A noble, likeable protagonist, a fatal flaw in that protagonist that will inevitably lead to his downfall (often hubris), and the downfall itself. Tua’s story has all three.

Our protagonist must overcome a lot to find success. Tagovailoa started his football career at eight years old in Pop Warner, but before that, his father had dreams of his son becoming the next big football player.

College Gameday featured the Tagovailoa family in a well-intended 2018 puff piece, attempting to paint a picture of a tight-knit family breeding success in the unlikely setting of ‘Ewa Beach, Hawai’i. Instead, the segment invited scorn over Galu Tagovailoa, Tua’s father, and his training methods.

He’d take a toddling Tua to the beach for training, well before an appropriate age for any kind of work ethic to be expected. If Tua didn’t perform in his high school football games or the classroom, he’d “get it,” later explaining that “the belt was involved.” With a sigh, his mother confirms, “He means the bible and the belt,” in response to Galu’s commitment to faith and discipline in the Tagovailoa home.

Extolling corporal punishment is no new theme for the NFL. I had my fair share of that discourse during Adrian Peterson’s child abuse scandal. I do not believe it’s right, but I must acknowledge that it is common. Common enough that Tagovailoa likely had teammates and rivals who went through the same or similar experiences.

It’s an unusual case, anyway. The laid-back beaches of Oahu do not exactly inspire the sort of blood, sweat, and tears environment that forged Tua Tagovailoa. Even more uniquely, Galu taught Tua to throw left-handed. Galu was “the only lefty in the family,” so he made his son a lefty.

But Tua is only left-handed when throwing the football. He’s naturally right-handed in everything else. Aside from the grim picture we’re painting here, that makes for an interesting dynamic called “cross-dominance”. Has Tua been throwing with his non-dominant hand for his whole career? Has this held him back?

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But for those who want to be notified by newsletter when a new podcast is posted or want to subscribe internal to the Substack app, this option now exists with its own RSS feed.

Episode Notes:

• Matt Fries’ piece — a Comprehensive Minnesota Vikings Mock Free Agency — is a thorough, 11,000-word breakdown on how the Vikings might handle free agency.

• I recently broke the news that Teamworks is set to acquire Pro Football Focus

• I discussed with Trevor my theories about why this might be the fastest combine of all time. Including selection bias.

• A listener asked about being “convinced that JJ cannot improve” and he’s right that we can’t know he won’t. He mentioned McCarthy’s improvement late in the season; back in December, Matt Fries wrote about it

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The NFL’s content machine keeps on churning.

It’s been less than a month since the Super Bowl, but everyone has already moved on. With the NFL Combine last weekend, draft season is in full swing, but there’s another high-profile event before the NFL Draft takes place: free agency. It’s somehow almost here.

The NFL’s free agency period officially starts on March 11, but the “legal” tampering period starts two days before that on March 9, so we’ll soon be hearing about deals teams have struck. The “illegal” tampering is likely already in full swing; the NFL Scouting Combine, which doubles as a convention for team personnel and agents, sees those teams and agents interact late into the night in the back rooms of Indianapolis. Agents leave the festivities with an understanding of what their clients will command next week, and teams leave with a good idea of who they could acquire.

Minnesota Vikings interim GM Rob Brzezinski will have his work cut out for him as he tries to improve the roster. The team has several holes and is well over the salary cap for 2026. The NFL has finalized its salary cap at $301.2 million for the 2026 season, which means the Vikings are $45.5 million over the cap, per OverTheCap.

To be fair, the team can easily move money around to get cap compliant, and Wide Left has covered how the Vikings can get under the cap, which impending free agents the team should keep, and what needs the team will have heading into free agency. This piece will combine those moves and dive into available outside free agents, creating a full mock free agency for the team.

Author’s Note: I want this exercise to be as realistic as possible, but it is not necessarily a prediction. In some of these situations, I’m suggesting a move the team is unlikely to make, but it’s the better choice. There are many winding paths, and at some point, you just have to make a decision. Information on the salary cap and existing contracts comes from OTC. For contract projections, I projected the structures myself, but I used multiple resources to determine contract values, including PFF’s projections by Josh Queipo, The Athletic’s projections by Daniel Popper, and, when those were missing, player value judgments from OTC and Spotrac.

• Vikings’ Current Cap Situation

• Creating Cap Space

  • Releases

  • Extensions

  • Restructures

• Team Needs and Cap Space Check-in

• Filling Out the Roster

  • Re-Signings

  • QB Decision

  • Free Agency Additions

• Final Roster and Cap Implications

Vikings’ Current Cap Situation

As mentioned above, the Vikings are roughly $45.5 million over the cap. More specifically, OTC lists them as $45,506,353 in the hole. This is their current cap space under the top-51 rule, which is how the NFL operates in the offseason: only counting a team’s top 51 cap hits. However, there are additional cap hits the team needs to account for when considering the entire season.

Some teams have fewer than 53 players on their roster. Those teams will need to account not only for 51 total players but also for 53, because that is how many players will be on the team on roster cutdown day, all of them counting against the cap. OTC has the Vikings listed with 54 players on their roster, so they don’t necessarily have to worry about that specific issue, but a small adjustment needs to be made to OTC’s accounting.

Harrison Smith’s contract is set to void, which means he will no longer be on the roster. However, OTC’s projection includes his $4.3 million cap hit among the team’s top 51. So, to accurately account for Smith not being on the roster, you need to subtract $885,000 from the Vikings’ available cap.

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Like many, I’m expecting Smith to retire with a post-June 1 designation, which means he will count $4.3 million in dead money against the Vikings’ cap in 2026 and $9 million in dead money in 2027, matching the current OTC projection. However, the OTC projection is strange because the $4.3 million projection includes a $1.3 million salary, which is the league minimum, which the team wouldn’t owe Smith if he retires. I also have some confusion about the $9 million dead cap hit in 2027 because the prorated bonuses past 2026 sum to $7.6 million, so the Vikings may have more cap space to work with by the amount those numbers differ.

The Vikings will also need to account for the salaries of their draft picks in their salary cap projections. They technically don’t need to worry about them until the drafted players are signed, and obviously, the team can still trade picks, changing the exact totals, but the team’s draft class is expected to cost an additional $5,029,009 against the cap.

Subtracting those two numbers from the Top 51 total gets you what OTC calls “effective cap space,” but it’s still important to consider in-season operations for the team. You can add $1.77 million for the minimum salaries of two players to get the team to 53 total players, but you also have to account for the practice squad.

Practice squad salaries count against the cap, and the standard practice squad salary is $247,500 for 2026. The team can also pay two players an extra stipend of up to $411,300 to be on the practice squad in 2026. The practice squad consists of 16 players, so assuming the Vikings use the larger number to the fullest, staffing the practice squad will cost $4,287,600.

If you count all of these odds and ends, you get to what I consider to be the “operating” cap space for the team, which means that they’re currently $57,477,962 in the hole.

Author’s note: At the end of all of the moves in this piece, my goal is to get that operating cap space number above zero. The Vikings will have more costs than just the ones listed above during the season, particularly for replacing players who go on IR, but there’s no way to guess what the additional burden would be right now. They will also gain cap space by cutting or trading players that I am not predicting right now, so I think it will roughly cancel out anyway.

Creating Cap, Part 1 — Releases

There are three ways the Vikings can create cap space with an existing contract: releasing the player, signing the player to a contract extension, or restructuring the player’s contract to move cap hits into the future.

We’ll start with the most extreme option: cutting players under contract for cap relief. Let’s dive into each of the moves.

If you want to be pedantic, you could count trades and pay cuts (which I consider to be different from restructures), but I’m not projecting either in this piece because I can’t project other teams’ willingness to take a player via trade or a player’s willingness to accept a paycut. As a spoiler, I do have the Vikings adding one player via trade.

Release DT Javon Hargrave

Salary Cap Impact: -$10,955,882 mil in 2026

The biggest decision the Vikings’ front office has to make before free agency is what to do with their DT room. Hargrave, along with Jonathan Allen, are aging veterans the team added on large contracts last offseason.

Both had their moments last year, but neither lived up to the large salaries that they have in 2026. It seems as though the team has already made its choice, as Adam Schefter reported that the Vikings will release Hargrave and RB Aaron Jones if they can’t find trade partners.

I, maybe paradoxically, would choose to move on from Allen and keep Hargrave. While I think Allen is a better all-around player, Hargrave’s pass-rush ability is harder to find, especially in this year’s free agency class (as we’ll get to later).

Cutting Hargrave saves $10,955,882 in 2026, $4,422,550 more than Allen would, but it costs $18,089,118 more against the cap in 2027 because Allen will still be under contract. If the Vikings find a trade partner for Hargrave, they’d save an additional $4 million in cap space due to his guaranteed salary, which would be a nice benefit.

Running 2026 Operating Cap Space Tally: -$47,407,080

Release RB Aaron Jones

Salary Cap Impact: -$7,750,000 mil in 2026

Jones is 31, well past the age most RBs continue to produce. He’s been plagued with injuries throughout his career and missed five games last year due to them. While Jones was still effective when healthy, he is past his peak, and his $10 million salary is high for an RB, especially one with age and injury concerns.

While I decided to release him, the Vikings should strongly consider retaining Jones. I like how Jones, as the lead back, pairs with Jordan Mason. I would not want Mason to be pushed into lead duties, so even if the Vikings move on from Jones, they should bring in another back who is an explosive runner and offers value as a pass catcher and protector to split time.

Mason is a consistent between-the-tackles runner and a bigger back who can grind out additional yardage. However, he doesn’t have the speed to generate explosive runs and adds next to nothing as a pass catcher. When I watch Mason pass block, his technique and approach are good, but the results were atrocious last year in terms of allowing pressure. With CJ Ham also retiring, the Vikings need someone they trust in protection on third downs.

Therefore, I would want any RB the Vikings bring in to be an explosive player who was trusted in pass protection, severely limiting the options. Depending on who they think they can get, that might bring them right back to Jones. I’d be willing to keep Jones at his price tag in that scenario, but would also expect the team to ask Jones to take a pay cut, and hope he accepts.

Running 2026 Operating Cap Space Tally: -$40,542,080

Release C Ryan Kelly

Salary Cap Impact: -$8,347,647 mil in 2026

Kelly was good when he was on the field last year, but the multiple concussions he sustained in 2025 put his future into doubt. Kelly could easily decide to retire, which would save the Vikings just as much money as a release would.

From the Vikings’ perspective, releasing Kelly would create a need at center, but it’s worth it because the likelihood of another injury making Kelly unavailable represents a massive liability.

Running 2026 Operating Cap Space Tally: -$33,079,433

Retain and Do Not Restructure TE TJ Hockenson

As free agency is approaching, one of the biggest drumbeats around the Vikings has been that they’ll do something with Hockenson’s contract, whether that’s a release or trade.

The Athletic’s Alec Lewis (who does great work) has been throwing out the idea of lowering Hockenson’s cap hit. Lewis is plugged into the team, so I’m sure that the Vikings are strongly considering that as an option.

In the best-case scenario, Hockenson is willing to take a pay cut, and the team does not have to cut him or move money into the future on his contract. As I mentioned above, I don’t want to project pay cuts because I can’t predict whether a player will accept one. If Hockenson doesn’t, I would not cut him or release him.

The number being discussed is Hockenson’s cap hit, which is nearly $21.3 million in 2026. That’s the highest cap hit for any TE, so when Hockenson isn’t the best TE in the league, it is easy to say that number is too much.

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However, talking about the cap hit that way doesn’t make sense. Ultimately, the Vikings owe Hockenson $16 million in cash this season, not $21 million. The additional cap hit is due to pro-rated bonus money they can’t control. When looking to free up cap space, you should not look at a player’s total cap hit, only the cash they’re owed in the current year and the money that you can save.

For Hockenson, the Vikings would save only about $8.9 million against the cap if they released him, and they would then need to use that money to replace him. So why should we talk about $21.3 million?

There’s another confounding factor leading to the perception that Hockenson’s cap hit is an issue. Tight end salaries have simply not increased significantly because there have not been good players pushing the market.

When Hockenson signed his deal in 2023, his $16.5 million/year deal made him the second-highest-paid TE in the NFL, behind only Darren Waller at $17 million. Three years later, his deal ranks third, behind George Kittle and Trey McBride. The salary cap was $244.8 million in 2023. Pro-rating Hockenson’s deal to 2026 would make the deal $22.1 million per year.

Essentially, because Kittle and Kelce have been the best TEs in the NFL over the past 10-ish years, and few young players have become standouts, no one is pushing the top of the market. Prior to McBride signing an extension last April, the market had moved from Waller’s $17 million per year to Kelce’s $17.125 million per year, while the cap had risen by over $50 million.

The reason is that teams get in trouble when they push money on underperforming contracts into the future. I count Hockenson as a player underperforming his contract, even if I don’t want to move on from him. Therefore, I would look to restructure other players before moving money on Hockenson’s contract.

If we want to entertain the idea of the Vikings releasing Hockenson, I do not believe making Josh Oliver the team’s lead TE would be a good idea. Oliver is an excellent blocker, but is just a guy as a pass catcher.

Hockenson is a strong blocker (2025 may have even been his best season as a blocker, from a tape perspective) and can stretch the defense vertically as a receiver. That ability to get vertical stretch is massively important for the construction of the Vikings’ offense, and to convince me that a player is a suitable replacement for Hockenson, he would also need to provide that.

I don’t think Hockenson is the player he was at his peak, but he’s 85-90% of the player who got 960 yards before suffering a brutal knee injury in 2023. His production in 2025 was significantly hampered by QB and OL play because he was constantly asked to stay in and chip, limiting the routes he could run.

Frankly, none of the TEs available in free agency are as good as Hockenson is right now. Dallas Goedert and David Njoku could provide something close to what Hockenson does, but both are older. Why would you want to move on from Hockenson only to spend that money on an older player?

On the younger side of free agent options, Isaiah Likely is not a strong enough blocker to replace Hockenson, and Chig Okonkwo is another move TE. Cade Otton is a great blocker, but lacks the athleticism to play the role the Vikings would need him to.

Daniel Bellinger would intrigue me as a player with the size to block and the athleticism to be a passing game weapon, but there’s a reason the Giants phased him out for Theo Johnson. Beyond that, no young player has a history as a starting TE.

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This year’s NFL Combine purports to be the fastest combine in NFL history. In addition to record-breaking performances from Kenyon Sadiq, Lorenzo Styles Jr. and Sonny Styles, we’ve seen overall performances at the NFL Combine jump ahead of what we’ve seen historically. To the best of our verification ability, this is the fastest NFL Combine class of all time.

While that might not be a perfect indicator of talent, it certainly is exciting; we could be watching historic moments in a historic class that may or may not pan out but certainly has the juice to alter the geometry of football.

But something feels off.

While some elements of this class — like linebacker — are considered to be strong relative to the past few years, the way draft experts have talked about the class has been pessimistic. In fact, many scouts and draft analysts Wide Left spoke to in Indianapolis regard this as the worst draft class in over a decade, with some saying it’s the worst since the much-reviled 2013 draft class.

That’s not to say that we should expect that the fastest players are the best players and that the fastest classes are the highest-quality classes, but athleticism is broadly correlated to talent, even if that relationship isn’t rock solid.

Surely, if a draft class was genuinely the fastest we’ve ever seen, people would not think of it in terms of some of the worst classes the draft has ever produced. After all, scouts chase upside.

Exploring the question of whether this class was genuinely as dramatically fast as the numbers indicate doesn’t just serve as an exploration in how many different ways we can arrive at particular types of data, but also how difficult it can be to make sure one is acquiring the correct data in the first place.

Are Players Getting Faster?

First, we should validate these findings. Are players at the NFL Combine posting faster times?

Yes.

This is a general trend we have seen since 2006, but the changes in speed were gradual and uneven across groups. It’s easier to identify when we move from overall 40 time (by combine-designated position group) to 40 time against positional average.

And then it becomes even easier when we average across positions (choosing to treat each position as one unit rather than being subject to the problems of uneven distribution of player invites across positions).

This makes it clear that, before ever including the 2026 data, there was already a trend of faster 40-yard dash times over the years. But 2026 represents a meteoric leap.

That change is substantial and warrants a deeper look. NFL players didn’t just post faster times in 2026; they posted blazing times. It’s also the case that prospects posted the best vertical leaps and broad jumps in NFL Combine history, something we can validate against the prior 20 combines.

NFL players are producing historic bests in 40-yard dash times, vertical leap and broad jump… but historic worsts in the agility drills.

This could be our first clue. It may not necessarily be because NFL players are actually faster.

Data Validation

Before we dig any further, it is imperative that we learn another lesson: get the right data! It is surprisingly difficult to obtain data from the NFL combine over the years. That’s not because the NFL hasn’t been diligent about posting combine data over time as the event has gained prominence, but because the sources we generally use aren’t ensuring the results are accurate.

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