Big Cat Country
Looking for clues about what may happen on draft weekend
Mock drafts are fun, but relentlessly unreliable. I say this after literally just publishing one for this very site, so feel free to call me a hypocrite! But if you bat at even 20% of correct picks on your first round mock, you’re outpunching almost everyone in the draft community.
Predicting who the Jacksonville Jaguars will take at 17 when we don’t know what 16 other teams will do before them is almost impossible - and let’s not even get started on Days 2 and 3.
But what can we learn from the General Manager’s previous drafting that might give us some hints for what to expect this weekend?
Trent Baalke has overseen nine different drafts as GM of both the Jags (2021-23) and previously the San Francisco 49ers (2011-16). He has selected 90 players across those drafts, from which there are a variety of trends we can identify.
Here are some of those tendencies, and what they mean - if anything - for this year:
Looking at the table of players above, the first thing we need to do is give Trent Baalke his due; this man has an extraordinarily high hit rate in the first round.
Now, that might sound silly, as you’d expect most teams to be better at identifying the elite talent in each draft class. In actual fact, almost half of each year’s first round picks are considered poor selections, with approximately 46% of them ending up on different teams before or once their rookie contracts expire.
Baalke gets a pass on Aldon Smith, with off-the-field issues affecting his reliability in San Fran - but the talent wasn’t in question. The only poor pick would be the 2012 selection of Illinois’ AJ Jenkins, with the receiver traded after one year to the Kansas City Chiefs and being out of the league by the time he was 24.
Aside from that, there are starters, Pro Bowlers and All-Pro’s speckled across both teams he spearheaded. Baalke’s recent selections in Jacksonville seem good enough to maintain that trend.
If nothing else, history tells us that this front office should be trusted, or at the very least given the benefit of the doubt, when it comes to the first round.
Many Jags fans expect the team to target cornerback early in this draft. It’s a logical conclusion based on the change at defensive coordinator and the release of starting outside corner Darious Williams this offseason - and is a position that has only modestly been addressed in free agency with the addition of Ronald Darby. However, it might surprise you to learn that Baalke has NEVER selected a cornerback in the first round of a draft before. Does that suggest he prefers finding late round value at the position?
Well, dig deeper and the theory is vindicated - Baalke has selected 13 corners in total, the most per position...
