Stampede Blue
The yearly draft leak article is months away, but we can look at how we get there, now.
Welcome to the first article in the series that gets us to the 2025 Chris Ballard NFL Draft Leak. An unofficial Indianapolis Colts annual tradition. Compiling the draft leak article is a labor of love but it’s a process I realized I could do a better job documenting. Normally I just compile pages and pages of notes leading up to creating THE List, but this year these articles will be my guide to creating the most well researched and well reasoned draft leak article of all time. If you want a refresher on the Colts observable draft process, which might help you understand how this article and the other articles in this series relate to the draft, you can brush up on that process by rereading the 2024 Draft Leak article, I didn’t hit on any names last year but the overarching process will remain the same. Last time we identified the Colts 2025 positions of need, which you can read here. Today we’re going to identify draftable targets at the Colts positions of need by round.
This exercise is by far the most difficult part of the draft prediction game. People who do this year round struggle to predict what round some players will be drafted in. Sometimes it’s an issue with a players medical exams, sometimes it’s unknown off the field, character concerns, sometimes the NFL just doesn’t like a guy the way the online draft community does. So this part of the process is less concrete and I’ve found it’s best to outsource this as much as I can. If I watch a prospect, I feel confident in my ability to tell you what area of the draft I think he’ll be taken, but I also know that I’m probably more confident than I should be. The bottom line is that when it comes to the draft consensus boards almost always end up being the most accurate way to identify draftable prospects and to some degree their position in the draft. Ultimately it’s not that I’m worse at this than others (I probably am, tough to say) but nobody is as good as an examination of the collective rankings.
As the day draws nearer and nearer, there will be quite a bit of movement in these rankings and it will be interesting to track them as time goes on. Eventually, I will compare multiple sources, including Lance Zierlein, who does great work each and every year. I don’t always agree with Lance but for this exercise that’s a good thing. For now, I’m going to be using the PFF Mock Draft Simulator. I like PFF’s simulator if for no other reason than the fact that Trevor Sikkema plays a large part in it’s player database. Sikkema is another person who does great work forecasting the draft every year. This isn’t something I’ll use a couple months...
