Sports Illustrated

Last year, in a final moment of mock-draft panic, I called editor Mitch Goldich just before midnight and asked that Trey Lance and Mac Jones be swapped in my post. I originally had Lance going third to the 49ers because, the reasoning went, Lance would add a unique dynamic to Kyle Shanahan’s offense—a kind of Robert Griffin III–plus-plus—that would lend itself to concepts that would force defenses to fight against themselves to solve the scheme. I decided to move up Jones because, as I wrote at the time, the coach had an affinity for fast processors whose accuracy developed before their body strength. Jones was certainly that player. After feeling the stinging disappointment when Shanahan opted for Lance, my mock-drafting goals began to shift. I would like to lean not toward what teams will do but what they should do. Call it a moving scoring system, but it’s nice to be proven right after the fact if a player you liked, who gets passed over by a team, ends up succeeding elsewhere. While teams will never admit it, they make decisions for all kinds of different reasons. They’re afraid to be wrong. They have to listen to their owner. They are lorded over by some dark, analytical machine that secretly directs their decision-making process and only reveals its choice of Harvey Mudd College linebacker Mack Stillman six days before the draft, totally alienating their scouts and coaching staff.