A collection of pre-draft thoughts

Player mentions

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The draft has come quick, feeling early this year with an April 23 start. In my head, it’s always the final days of the month, and then May 1 is like Monday after the draft and all our rookie drafts start and we’re off and running. This year, May 1 falls on a Friday, and that will be a full week after Day 2 of the draft. I’ve been a bit quiet around here lately, in part because this rookie class has been difficult to get overly excited about, and in part because I’ve been doing a combination of handling some important behind-the-scenes stuff, coaching my daughter in softball again (this came up somewhat unexpectedly as they needed help at the high school), and planning and executing a fun Spring Break trip for the family in early April, in the middle of it all. Usually this is where I apologize for not giving you guys more offseason content, but I absolutely crushed January through mid-March, most of which fell into that category of being in a bit of a different lane than what other analysts are doing, and thus hopefully adding value to what you’re seeing elsewhere. I’m satisfied with all that, and with what I have coming for you guys in the next few months. But it’s meant extra pre-draft rookie content fell by the wayside again this year. For those of you who are newer, I’ve never been a huge early offseason rookie deep dive guy, mostly because I didn’t play dynasty until after I was a content producer, and I never really fell in love with the scouting game. I consider myself far more of an “expert” on the NFL, and I tend to learn about the rookies in earnest while going through projections after I can put them on an NFL roster and really consider what their careers might look like. That doesn’t mean I haven’t done a lot of work on the rookies, both updating some of my own spreadsheets, and more practically checking in on the other analysts I really enjoy, and seeing what they are thinking about this class. That always includes my Stealing Bananas co-host Shawn Siegele, who just dropped a top-40 cheat sheet breaking down the class for fantasy purposes over at RotoViz , plus my guys JJ Zachariason with his Late-Round Prospect Guide , Pat Kerrane with his tiered work over at Legendary Upside , and Jakob Sanderson with his work at his Substack, Thinking About Thinking . There are a ton more great analysts covering these rookies, and I absolutely try to take in everything I can, but there’s also a reality that there’s overlap in a lot of the ways to look at these guys analytically, and you probably get a pretty good feel for the profiles if you have a few or even just a couple strong sources you trust. Of course, as I’m trying to toe a line of not wanting to present heavily influenced work as my own independent research, I do know there are a great many of you who subscribe here for my thoughts as your biggest source of fantasy content. I’ve always told you guys to read other sources in conjunction with my work, but I’ve heard you over the years that not all of you are doing that, especially because I write so damn much and don’t make that easy. So while I might give credit elsewhere, I get that you still want to know how I’m processing and evaluating things on my end, even when some of it is my repeated commentary that prospecting is really difficult, and there’s probably a decent amount of inefficiency with all of it. That’s not to knock anything or anyone, because obviously content is fun to consume, and frankly my livelihood depends o…