Baltimore Beatdown

Well, folks, it’s here. You’ve waited several long months full of everything from an event known colloquially as “the Underwear Olympics,” to a fraught last few weeks of reckless speculation and news breaking that could be similarly referred to by the name of “Smoke Screen Season.” That’s right — it’s the NFL Draft, tonight at 8 p.m. EST. One thing you’ve assuredly encountered along this journey is the mock draft. It’s an exercise in, if not futility, then simple diversion. Perhaps nothing has become more oversaturated and done-to-death in the already comically so world-at-large of the NFL, than the mock draft, a predictive choose your own adventure scenario in which everyone from big-haired, Baltimore based draftniks, to brand new fans of the league, can take a crack at predicting how things will shake out during the annual selection process. At this point, there’s maybe nothing that inundates the NFL digital media landscape more than mock drafts of both large and small import except for fantasy football content, and to be fair, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.