Why mock drafts suck

It's still over a month and a half until the NFL Draft starts. Some NFL fans will spend the upcoming weeks reading over the biggest waste of time this side of feeding a pet rock: Mock drafts.

I suppose I could put a whole laundry list of complaints here, and cite various sources around the sportswriting world, but that's much more effort than I feel like going into for the people who are (or, based on the feedback this blog is getting, aren't) reading what gets posted. So, I leave the research up to you, my lazy reader, to do. Suffice it to say, if you came here expecting to read about mock drafts, you will see much of the former, and little of the latter.

Let me first begin by saying that mock drafts are almost always done with the order of the draft remaining intact, which is completely crazy, since teams trade up and down in the draft all the time. Mock drafts simply cannot know which teams will do what, so they forge ahead with the idea that no team will do anything. Allow that logic to sink in: since we don't know what will change, we'll assume that nothing changes.

From there, it seems like any asshole who happens to follow the NFL even a little bit will decide to post his or her mock draft. Never mind that most people don't even know what an NFL draft board looks like, and have never been inside one of the "war rooms" that coaches, personnel directors, and scouts fill during the draft. So these people have no clue as to: a) what players teams value, and b) what positions teams need to address. These people merely make "educated" (this is going to be used in a rather loose sense here) guesses (much more accurate) as to who they think a team will select, if the team even keeps their draft position.

That's right, folks. These people don't know what a team is looking for, and who a team is really looking at, or even if the team will even be picking then, but they are intent on determining who all 32 teams are going to draft.

I could go on, and I probably will. I mean, I still have a good six and a half weeks worth of mock drafts to pore over.