2026 NFL Draft Grades For All 32 Teams

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This will be the seventh year I’ve done some form of draft grades article. Generally I’ll intro with an explanation for why draft grades can be useful even if we won’t know how the 257 players selected this past weekend will perform for at least two to three more years. I thought about switching it up, but the social media discussion in the wake of the 2026 NFL Draft shows there’s still plenty of griping and misunderstanding about post-draft analysis, a lot of it from gate-keeping dinosaurs. It’s true we’re not going to know the results from this weekend for a few years. That doesn’t mean opinions and analysis on the process are invalid. This was the 90th draft in NFL history, so there are well-established do’s and don’ts. I went into some detail on them in the first-round draft grades article on Friday: Trading down > trading up (usually) Beware reaching against consensus Premium picks should be used on premium positions Needs matter but zoom out And of course, knowing the rules to know when to break them is good advice for any field. None of these maxims breaks new ground in terms of analysis. Trading down to get more picks has been a sharp strategy for ages. Most people agree it’s bad to take a kicker with a high pick because they’re not a premium role. And No. 4 can be reworded as taking the best player available, something every GM claims they do with every pick. I want to talk a little more about No. 2, though, because that has generated recent debate, including misconceptions about what the “consensus board” is. It’s true no one has access to grades from all 32 teams to publish an aggregate average. But if you take rankings from all the different analysts in the huge industry that has become NFL draft media — your Mel Kiper’s and Dane Brugler’s and even our own Ethan Woodie — you get a “consensus board” that is equal, if not a tick better, to the NFL at predicting which players will be successful. There are multiple consensus boards with slightly different methodologies, but we use the one from Arif Hasan at Wide Left (as do a few NFL teams actually). If you have a question about the project, Arif and others have probably answered it in their extensive writings, so if you’re curious, you can follow the link and learn more. If not, I’m sure I’ll see you in the comments. I do want to take a second to clarify that the consensus board is not independent of the countless hours and resources NFL teams pour into evaluating prospective players. The board actually captures this. Many analysts have sources and contacts within the NFL they lean on as they compile their rankings. The ones that don’t shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, either, as there’s so much more information available now. It’s resulted in vastly better NFL analysis than two to three decades ago. Ravens GM Eric DeCosta alluded to this in his pre-draft press conference, saying there is almost no such thing as a sleeper anymore because the Internet and social media allow people to find these under-the-radar prospects. So when an NFL team takes a player far ahead of where the consensus board has him ranked, what that team is saying isn’t that it thinks it’s smarter than the media and fans. It’s saying it thinks it’s smarter than the other 31 teams. That’s a claim that should naturally be treated with skepticism. In this draft in particular, it felt like a lot of teams were making that argument… Grades are listed from best to worst. Biggest reaches are weighted slightly towa…