Windy City Gridiron
Overview
One of the many things that’s interesting about the NFL Draft is the way draft analysts and experts create elaborate evaluations of players, try to predict what NFL teams will do, and then repeat the entire process the next year with very little accountability or reflection on what happened the prior year. I have previously written about how little similarity there tends to be between draft boards and draft reality. Despite this, there are a few experts touted as “the best in the business” in their fields, and I thought it was worth looking into this claim with respect to one particular grouping of players.
Offensive linemen.
The reason for this focus is threefold. First, I highly value offensive line play and enjoy evaluating the play of offensive linemen myself. Second, it represents a rare balance in the draft where quality offensive linemen are found throughout the draft (unlike wide receivers or edge defenders, for example) but also where there are notable decreases in talent at each level of the draft (unlike safety, for instance). Third, there are notable “evaluators” of offensive line prospects to discuss. Specifically, Brandon Thorn is widely considered one of the best in the business, and people relentlessly cite Pro Football Focus evaluations of offensive linemen as if they are meaningful in some way despite very little independent confirmation of their results.
Methods
In order to perform this evaluation, I needed a pool of players and a way of evaluating their performance. Because Thorn began publicly contributing his offensive line prospect rankings to Bleacher Report in 2021, I pulled the big boards from 2021-2023 using the one that was published closest to the draft itself, normalizing all for relative rank instead of absolute rank (for example, while Teven Jenkins was the 12th-ranked player on Bleacher Report’s overall board, he was Thorn’s third-highest offensive linemen, so he was ranked 3rd). Pro Football Focus needed to be considered, as mentioned, given their visibility in the field. Additionally, Windy City Gridiron’s own Jacob Infante graciously allowed me to evaluate his boards. I have previously found that Daniel Jeremiah’s rankings align with the NFL draft itself better than almost anyone else, so I included him. To provide an overarching frame of reference, I also considered the big boards from the NFL Mock Draft Database’s consensus big boards. Each board went through the same normalizing process as mentioned above.
Note that there is an annual draft guide that many people use which I am not including here except in a limited capacity. I typically try to use public data or information that was willingly shared with me by the creator, but because I know there will be questions I will refer to aspects of this work as well.
Of course, it’s not enough to simply compare these individuals to the draft itself, however, because front offices also make mistakes. As a Bears fan, I’m only too aware of how readily a team can draft a player high just to...
