Windy City Gridiron
WCG’s lead draft analyst compares his 2025 NFL Draft accuracy to one of the best analysts in the business.
With the 2025 NFL Draft in the rearview mirror, now is as good of a time as any to compare my own analysis to the way the league evaluates talent.
I’m already onto my 2026 NFL Draft analysis, much to the joy or chagrin of whichever reader you might ask. Before I go full steam into next year’s class, however, I wanted to go through a helpful exercise that I discovered last year.
NFL Network’s Daniel Jeremiah is one of the best in the business, and for the last few years, his website has been tracking his accuracy within the top 150 picks of the NFL Draft. Each year, you can see how the top 150 players of his board stack up to the first 150 selections in each class.
As a part-time draft analyst who does this on the side instead of as a full-blown career, I was curious to see where my numbers compare to that of a professional media scout. I obviously don’t expect my numbers to be as good — there’s a reason Jeremiah is a professional and I am not — but I’m always striving to be a better evaluator and provide better draft content for you all.
Last year, I saw 82.7% of my top 150 prospects selected in that same range of the 2024 NFL Draft. That comes out to 124 players.
The 2025 draft class was not as kind to me, unfortunately. Of the first 150 picks in the 2025 NFL Draft, 115 of them were also in my top 150 prospects on my big board. That comes out to a percentage of 76.6%.
This isn’t to say my evaluations were wrong, per se. 145 of my top 150 prospects got drafted, which leads to a 96.6% percentage that fell short of Jeremiah’s perfect score, but it does beat out his percentages from 2020 and 2022. There’s also the chance I get players right that the league doesn’t.
That said, I’m a little disappointed the numbers dropped the way they did in 2025.
Out of the 257 players selected in the 2024 NFL Draft, I ranked 228 of them in my own top 257 for a percentage of just over 88.7%. There were 10 players in total whom I did not have any scouting report on, adding up to a percentage of just under 3.9%. That just so happens to be the exact amount of players I missed in 2024, despite my watching 39 prospects in 2025 than I did the year before.
Ironically, the highest-picked player I didn’t have a formal grade on was Bears linebacker Ruben Hyppolite II, who got picked in Round 4. Outside of him, though, I had a grade on every player selected through the first six rounds, including the three special teamers.
The next player happened to be Marcus Bryant from Missouri —...
