Reading through some of the Zone Reads archives, I discovered a mock draft from 2013 I made with the sole goal of identifying picks no one else was projecting for a team. I thought about that and decided it was a neat intellectual exercise– if you kept to two rules: The picks have to be […]
Category: Off-Season
The Top 42 Prospects, Part 2
Whoa. The last column took long enough that I had to break it off after #23. On top of that, yesterday was a totally bonkers day in the NFL, as free agency officially opened and multiple big trades went down within minutes of one another. I’ll write up my thoughts on those trades soon, but […]
First round of evaluations: Top 42 Prospects
We’re still relatively early in our film-watching process, two months before the draft, but between our work and what we read by other terrific experts in the field (if you want a list, this is a pretty good start), I felt it was time to stoke the fires of reader interest a bit by publishing […]
“F— It, I’m Going Deep” (Sleeper Series): Brandon Bridge
Hello once again, fellow draft devotees and combine connoisseurs. I speak to you today to preach the word of Brandon Bridge. He comes from a land where pines and maples grow, great prairies spread, and Lordly rivers flow. That’s right: Mobile, Alabama, where sits the University of South Alabama, playing football in the Sun Belt […]
Our first (wildly inaccurate and ill-informed) Mock Draft, Part 2
Click here for part 1. Rounds 2 and 3 won’t have as much detail, because, good Lord, I’m not trying to write a 7,500-word column. I’ll try to include a brief explanation of each pick, though. ROUND 2 Tennessee Titans – Jalen Collins, CB, LSU Still need DB help, and Collins is a tremendous athlete […]
Our first (wildly inaccurate and ill-informed) Mock Draft, Part 1
Mock Drafts are pointless and inaccurate. They’re also fun to write and fun to read. We’ve begun film work for this year’s draft, but we’re nowhere near forming complete opinions, and as we gather more information about prospects, discover some sleepers, and are able to access more and more film, some of these picks are […]
What we learned from our 2014 draft scouting
The NFL Draft fascinates us, and has become a major topic of study at Zone Reads, in large part because of the gap of knowledge between what we know and what we want to know; that is to say, the NFL Draft is far from an exact science, and while some of the causes for […]
Thoughts on the recent NFL coaching changes
All in all, it was a pretty typical offseason as far as upheaval in the NFL head coaching ranks goes. Since the dust finally seems settled (only Atlanta’s head coaching job remains open, and it’s all but given that Seahawks DC Dan Quinn will immediately take it following the Super Bowl), I thought I’d look […]
A Tale of Two Runners: Bishop Sankey and Jeremy Hill
In the 2005 NFL draft, three running backs were selected within the first five picks: Ronnie Brown (#2), Cedric Benson (#4), and Cadillac Williams (#5). Since then, we’ve seen Reggie Bush, Adrian Peterson, Darren McFadden, C.J. Spiller, and Trent Richardson all come off the board in the top 10. But we’ve seen a change in […]
The Ray Rice Suspension Further Reveals the NFL’s Moral Emptiness
By now, you’ve likely read a great deal about Ray Rice uppercutting his fiancee’ in an elevator in February, seen the footage of Rice dragging her unconscious body from said elevator, heard about the NFL’s light discipline for him and its general cluelessness regarding how that would be perceived. You’ve probably read the great column […]
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