DiCerbo: Grading My Mock Drafts: Wins and Losses!

Story by Yinzer Crazy Contributor Anthony DiCerbo. Follow him on Twitter @SnarfVenom

Draft season is officially over, and we are now inching closer and closer to the return of football. Mini camp will kick off in the coming days then before we know it the Steelers will be packing their bags for Latrobe. 

As someone who did a number of mock drafts leading up to the big event I always like to go back through, check my work, and see how well (or how awful) I did. 

So I'm grading all four of my mock drafts to see how I did. 

Four Round Mock Draft 1 

1. Joey Porter Jr. 

2. Dawand Jones 

3. Mazi Smith 

4. Noah Sewell 

5. Zach Kuntz 

This first mock draft had some hits and some misses. Right off the bat, Joey Porter Jr. is a Steeler, but instead of hearing his name called in the first, he had to wait until the top of the second round. This was a popular pick, but not many thought back in March it would happen in the second round. 

Moving on, if you told me when I originally wrote this one that the Steelers would get Joey Porter Jr. and Broderick Jones while only giving up a 4th round pick, I would’ve thought that was impossible. I thought Dawand Jones was a much more likely name, especially if the tackles were gone in the first. 

Mazi Smith was a first rounder that many didn’t see coming, and I still think early-mid second round would’ve been a better fit for him. The idea with this pick was still there, as this was the selection that turned out to be Keeanu Benton. 

One of the glaring misses is the lack of an OLB. I originally opted for an inside player, but now I’m fine with this miss. 

If you swapped the last two picks here you’d end up with something pretty close to what actually ended up happening. I took Kuntz here for a lot of the same reasons the Steelers actually ended up with Darnell Washington. He’s a big athletic tight end that didn’t exactly have the prettiest college stats, but possessed the ideal body for the NFL.

Looking at this one I don’t think I did too bad. Porter Jr. is the only one that actually ended up in Pittsburgh, but I was 4 for 5 on positions, so I’ll be happy with that. 

Grade: B+ 

Full First Round Mock Draft: 

The first round this year was especially unpredictable, and looking back at these makes that really clear. 

That being said there were a few things that I got right, or at least kind of right. First off, I had Will Anderson going 3rd, but I didn’t have the Texans trading up to go back-to-back. I also had the Steelers landing Broderick Jones but doing so while staying at pick 17. 

I did nail a couple of things though. I had Zay Flowers going to the Ravens and Bryan Breese going to the Saints. Those two picks had both the right pick and the right team, so yay me. 

The Lions also grabbed Brian Branch in this one, but it was in the first round, not the second. 

The rest of this mock was filled with a lot of misses. I went into this one with a mindset that if I got a couple right, I’d be happy, and I accomplished that much at least. Still, not great though. 

Grade: C 

Four Round Mock Draft 2: 

1. Brian Branch 

2. John Michael Schmitz 

3. Josh Downs 

4. Gervon Dexter Sr. 

5. Ivan Pace Jr. 

Back to focusing on the Steelers and… not a great one here. This was probably my most pessimistic of all the potential scenarios for the Steelers. I liked Branch as a flexible DB, but he didn’t actually go in the first round. Schmitz isn’t a terrible pick in this one, but the team didn’t address center at all in the draft. 

I still think Downs was probably relatively high on the Steelers draft board, but this was before the Allen Robinson deal when I thought WR was a much bigger need. 

Dexter Sr. was more or less a worse version of Keeanu Benton, and then again, I went back to ILB, but Ivan Pace Jr. didn’t even get drafted. Yikes.

This one was pretty terrible. I still don’t think that Downs and Schmitz were terrible guesses, but they didn’t land. 

Grade: D 

Final Seven Round Mock Draft: 

1. Paris Johnson Jr. ( via Trade Up) 

2. Tyrique Stevenson ( via Trade Down) 

3. Keeanu Benton 

4. Daiyan Henley (via Trade Down) 

5. Luke Wypler 

6. Charlie Jones (via Trade Up) 

7. Nick Herbig (via Tade Down) 

8. Deuce Vaughn 

9. Brandon Hill 

This was my last mock draft before the actual draft, and it is a dramatic improvement on the one before it. I correctly predicted the trade up, but the player and pick were misses, but the idea was there. I really thought the team would also trade down from 32. Instead of teams going after Levis I thought it would be for Hendon Hooker instead, either way it was a miss. 

The big thing this mock has going for it is the fact that both Nick Herbig and Keeanu Benton were both actually picked by the Steelers in the draft. It’s a little surprising to get some mid round picks right, but both of those guys felt like Steelers. 

I was still on the idea of taking an inside backer, and that certainly didn’t happen, nor did a center. I wanted to add an offensive weapon, turns out that was Darnell Washington not Charlie Jones. The seventh rounders were purley shots in the dark, so I’m not exactly surprised to not nail those ones. 

Overall, this was a pretty solid mock. Three for three on positions for the first three picks, correctly adding Keeanu Benton and Nick Herbig, and predicting a trade up is a win in my book. 

Grade: B+ 

Conclusion: 



Looking back through these I don’t think I did horrible. Most of my mock drafts had at least one or two redeeming qualities going for them. Admittedly though, that third one was really rough.

How do you think I did? I think these grades were pretty fair, some solid stuff, but nothing really deserving of an “A”. Oh well, better luck next year I guess!