Every April, as the NFL Draft wraps up, a familiar ritual unfolds: instant grades, bold predictions, and declarations of winners and losers. Someone "crushed it," someone else "reached." In that moment, we're trying to forecast three, four, even five years into the future based on what we thought we knew about college players. It's a little silly—maybe very silly—but in a strange way, it's also a useful exercise that can bring us closer to the truth.
That tension—between what draft grades pretend to be and what they actually are—lies at the heart of this discussion. When I zoom out and revisit my post-draft rankings from 2021 to 2025 (I'm skipping 2026 because it just happened, and none of those players have taken an NFL snap yet), a clearer picture emerges. It's not crystal clear, but it's less foggy. And it offers valuable insight into what teams were thinking in the moment—and, with hindsight, whether they got it right or very, very wrong.
Draft grades aren't meaningless, but we might be misusing them. They don't tell you what will happen; instead, they reflect what I believed should happen based on the information available at that time. At their core, these grades are snapshots, not forecasts. They capture a moment of hope, strategy, and projection—not a guaranteed outcome.
Before we dive in, and because showing my work is instructive, here are my days-after-draft grades from 2021–2025, which form the basis of this retrospective: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025. (If you're curious about 2026, you can find my full grades here.) Feel free to reference them, point, gawk, or laugh—because, if nothing else, it's a humble reminder that the draft is a crapshoot. None of us know how it will play out, but that's exactly what makes it so exciting.
Take the Patriots, for example. When I ranked them atop my 2021 list, it wasn't because I knew Mac Jones would shine or Christian Barmore would anchor the defensive line. My pre-draft ranking for each player is in parentheses below, and they reflect the best guess at the time—not a guarantee of future success. That's the beauty of draft grades: they're a starting point, not the final word.