Digging a little deeper into aggregated mock drafts, the great resource Walter Football has a very comprehensive mock draft database. They have gone through the trouble of tabulating the top 5 picks of each mock in one big table. That table looked something like this:
So I quickly tabulated the top 5 results from the mock draft database, only looked at mocks in 2014 and graphed their evolution over the last 4 months of the 2014 NFL Draft process. This ended up being 428 mocks for each pick in the top 5 from what is likely the largest mock draft database on the web. The graph is "Month" on the X axis, January through May and "Average pick" on the Y axis for some of the top prospects. So Jadeveon Clowney having an average close to 1 in May means, wait for it, that the "consensus" pick he would be selected was #1.
With this graph it is easy to visualize the consensus order of each prospect over time. Some interesting insights I'd love to know more about:
- Did mock drafters become more comfortable with Clowney to the Texans over time or is that a reflection of just what they were hearing?
- What is responsible for the separation between Blake Bortles and Clowney starting in March? They're pretty close and then Clowney clearly separates himself from Bortles and the pack to be the clear #1 pick. Combine or pro day?
- Did the Jake Matthews get worse in March or did people only realize then that Glen Robinson was a better OT?
- Who was ultimately responsible for leading the Johnny Manziel hype train? The media, the fans or was it all smokescreens from teams?