Photo by David Berding/Getty Images

This is part one of a three-part series about Harrison Smith, his impact, and how well his likeliest replacements, Jay Ward and Theo Jackson, will be able to fill his shoes. Part one will be about the basics of safety play, footwork, and tackling angles. Part 2 will be about safeties in Cover 2, and Part 3 will discuss how they play Quarters.

In the final game of the 2025 season, several of Harrison Smith’s teammates showed up to the game to honor his storied career. 

Twitter tweet

Andrew Sendejo, Anthony Harris, Xavier Rhodes and Anthony Barr all came out to celebrate The Hitman. Even Mistral Raymond and Jamarca Sanford, teammates from Smith’s earliest years, came out to show support. 

The entire game screeched to a halt as Kevin O’Connell called a timeout “to honor Harrison Smith”. Not to review a call or stop the clock, but to honor one player whose legacy justifies it.

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Smith is a six-time Pro Bowler, two-time All-Pro, and even got votes for Defensive Player of the Year in 2017. He notched 39 career interceptions. He’s been the backbone of historic defenses in the Mike Zimmer era and found a new stride with Brian Flores. I don’t need to justify this to you. You already agree.

He’s a Minnesota Legend, saying goodbye to the game he’s given so much, and that has given so much to him.

Or is he?

As of this writing, it’s unclear if Harrison Smith will retire or not. He could be waiting through the dog days of camp to come back, or genuinely mulling his future. The team is giving him space to make the decision, and so we wait. Maybe all that pomp and circumstance was for nothing.

In the meantime, the Vikings have to figure out a plan. Brian Flores spoke on the difficulties they are facing without him. “Somebody’s got to step into those roles and into those shoes,” he said. “That’s the National Football League. Whether it’s injuries, whether it’s guys moving on, every year is a little bit different, every team’s a little bit different.” 

He mentioned Jay Ward, Theo Jackson, and even Tavierre Thomas as veterans who know the assignments and can fill his shoes. It’s a tough sell. Theo Jackson went from a key cog in the defense to a rotational afterthought. Jay Ward only played 248 defensive snaps, but had a strong finish to the year. Thomas barely played on defense at all.

There’s always Joshua Metellus. In an ideal world, he would continue his famous Swiss Army Knife role, but last year that wasn’t quite possible with the goings-on elsewhere at safety. Metellus played 350 snaps at PFF’s “Free Safety” designation in 2025, more than double the total from 2023 and 2024 combined. 

I’d venture a guess that Flores doesn’t prefer Metellus at that role, but rather had no choice with injuries to Harrison Smith, the loss of Cam Bynum, and the aforementioned issues with Jackson and Ward. So let’s see if we can afford to leave him out of this. That shouldn’t be too much to ask with a fully healthy camp roster.

There’s also the new rookie Jakobe Thomas, something of a wild card in all of this. He could very well find his way into this equation somewhere. I think he has a puncher’s chance, but that’s a different and more speculative kind of dialogue than I’m going for today. For now, let’s chalk him up to an unpredictable rookie and leave him to the side.

That leaves Jackson and Ward to compete for the deep safety jobs. If they both fail, the Vikings will have to trot out Metellus with their tail between their legs. So can they do it? What is stopping Ward and Jackson from being bona fide starters going into this camp?

Theo Jackson’s role in the Vikings defense has been purely deep. He hasn’t been a regular part of Flores’ exotic blitz schemes, only rushing the passer 11 times in 529 snaps over 13 games. 369 of those, he aligned deep. He’s a true deep safety, unlike Smith or Ward, who play in the box much more often.

As such, we have to get to know the classic coverage responsibilities for a deep safety in Brian Flores’ defense. The Vikings live in split safety coverages, or Middle Of Field Open (MOFO), more than anyone else in the league, per Trumedia. In 2025 they ranked dead last in Cover 1 and Cover 3 usage, and 2nd in Cover 2 usage.

A chart I have tortured Arif with before, and I will torture him again.

dd Cover 4 (I’m going to call it Quarters) and the hybrid Cover 6, and you get the whole range of MOFO coverages. The Vikings still do use Cover 3 almost a third of the time, but many of those coverages are fire zone blitz coverages or other exotics - worthy of their own separate discussion someday.

Let’s stick to the MOFO coverages, which Flores loves, even as he blitzes - the defining feature of the exotic Flores defense. 

So for today, we’ll focus on Cover 2 and Cover 4 techniques. We have to learn a few fundamentals together so we can make sense of all this.

Contractually Obligated Feet Part Sponsored By Feetfinder

For today, I want to teach you three different kinds of safety footwork: scooch, catch, and backpedal. Backpedal is the easiest, and you’re probably already familiar with what it looks like. Hips over your heels, knees together, and walk backwards on the balls of your toes.

Here’s a really great one from Jay Ward, covering tons of distance while keeping his feet underneath him. Note how he uses his arms to maintain balance and control, “banging the drum”, as he may have been told when he was younger.

Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images for ONIT

After a drawn-out legal battle between Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby and the NCAA — the NCAA denied Texas Tech’s appeal to reinstate the quarterback, who placed over $90,000 of bets in four years at Indiana and Cincinnati, and courts instituted a temporary injunction allowing him to play the season before the Big 12 independently filed suit to prevent him from playing conference games — Sorsby decided to sidestep all of that and declare for the NFL’s Supplemental Draft. He should be the first player selected in the Supplemental Draft since 2019.

I took a deep dive into his tape to determine where quarterback-needy teams should value him.

Let’s figure out what he does and how teams should approach the question of spending a 2027 pick on him.

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Table of Contents

• The Supplemental Draft Explained

  • Draft Capital of QB-Needy Teams

• Where Should Sorsby Be Valued?

• The Brendan Sorsby Scouting Report

The Supplemental Draft Explained

The Supplemental Draft order is determined by a lottery system, with teams split into three groups based on their record from the previous year (in parentheses: QB-needy teams):

1. Teams with ≤6 wins (ARI/NYJ/CLE)
2. Non-playoff teams with >6 wins (MIA/MIN/ATL)
3. Playoff teams (PIT)

The order within each tier is randomly generated by a weighted lottery, which gives better odds to those with worse records.

Teams place blind bids, tied to a specific round, on players they want to draft. Players are awarded to the highest bidder, and those teams forfeit their corresponding draft pick the following year.

Draft Capital of QB-Needy Teams

ARI: 1/2/3/4/5/6/7
NYJ: 1/1/1/2/3/4/5/5/6/6
CLE: 1/1/2/3/4/4/4/5/5/5/7/7

MIA: 1/2/3/4/5/5/6/7
MIN: 1/2/3/3/5/5/7
ATL: 1/2/3/4/5/6

PIT: 1/2/3/4/5/7/7

I see seven teams with pressing needs at quarterback, who could be in play to draft Sorsby. A third-round pick probably won’t be enough, but if it is, I expect Tier 1 (ARI/CLE) to be his floor. The Steelers are in the third tier, so they likely won’t accomplish anything by bidding a third.

I view a second-round bid as appropriate value for most teams, although Pittsburgh could justify spending a first to jump ahead of the other tiers.

Where Should Sorsby Be Valued?

I gave Sorsby a mid-2nd round grade (6.13), which would place him as a distant QB3 in the 2027 class and a close QB3 in the 2026 class. Though he could have established himself as a first-rounder with another year in college, his physical tools and feel for the position are worth a top-50 pick in a vacuum. NFL teams will not be grading Sorsby in a vacuum, however, and his off-field issues will likely cause him to slide down or off of some boards. 

The league has shown to be uncompromising in its gambling policy enforcement, giving year-long suspensions to Calvin Ridley, Isaiah Rodgers, Quintez Cephus, C.J. Moore, and Shaka Toney for betting on their teams, and a six-game (later reduced to four) suspension to Jameson Williams for placing college football bets from the team hotel. Gambling, particularly on one’s own team, seems to be one of the NFL’s few ethical red lines, but we haven’t seen it tested at the team level by a draft prospect of this caliber. 

It’s unclear where, if at all, individual teams draw that line for prospects who will be immediately eligible, but were banned or suspended for gambling in college. The closest parallel is Hunter Dekkers, who received a lifetime NCAA ban for betting on Iowa State games, went undrafted in 2025, and now plays for the Houston Gamblers. But Dekkers and Sorsby aren’t in the same zip codes as prospects, so we shouldn’t expect them to be judged by the same standard.

Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images

I think most of the league would have had Sorsby graded as a late-first to mid-third round pick in last year’s class. The scale of his gambling addiction, which he described as “a compulsion which made it virtually impossible to resist the constant notifications I received from betting apps” and something he “lost complete control of”, is a major red flag that will probably limit how high GMs are willing to bid and might scare some teams off altogether. 

He’ll enter the NFL with a clean slate, but I’d be hesitant to invest an early pick in someone with such a high likelihood of recidivism. 

I would also be less willing to part ways with a 2027 pick than I would be for most classes.

While I expect many front offices to share my apprehension, league-wide quarterback desperation will drive up his value and could offset those concerns entirely.

The Brendan Sorsby Scouting Report

Strengths

• Sturdy build

• Arm talent

• Flexible release

• Velocity

• Touch

• Quick game

• Pocket mobility

• Poise under pressure

• Sack avoidance

• Short accuracy

• Deep accuracy within ~35 yards

• Movement/off-platform throws

• Decision making

Weaknesses

• Deep accuracy past ~35 yards

• Intermediate accuracy

• Anticipation

• MOF processing & ball placement

• Mechanics & footwork

• Jittery pocket movement

• Climbing the pocket

2025 Statistics

Ranks out of 118 qualifying quarterbacks

Arm Talent

Sorsby’s arm talent is his primary selling point as a quarterback prospect. He has a quick, flexible release, with the ideal blend of touch and velocity. He makes trick shots look easy and shows very little drop-off in accuracy when taking a hit or throwing off-platform.

He can accelerate his delivery in the face of pressure, or adjust his arm slot or release point to navigate crowded windows. When an unblocked defender obstructs the passing lane, Sorsby switches to a sidearm release and finds a clean angle.

Photo by David Berding/Getty Images

In March of 2014, the Vikings had to let Jared Allen go.

In the midst of a messy 2013 season, Allen made it clear he was looking to contend. He did not want to stay with a Vikings team that was about to hire a new head coach and enter a full scale rebuild.

In addition, Allen had never been a true free agent, instead having been subject to tags, tenders and trades. He wanted to play the market. There wasn’t much the Vikings could do, outside of convincing Jared Allen that they’d instantly contend with a new coaching staff and a rookie quarterback to be named later.

So, Jared Allen walked. Behind him was a relatively unheralded Everson Griffen, playing well but buried on the disastrous Alan Williams defense. That March, the Vikings signed him to a five-year megadeal.

The rest is history. Griffen went on to be a four-time Pro Bowler, All Pro, and mainstay of the Vikings organization. Next to him for many years was Brian Robison, no slouch in his own right. 

In the Vikings’ 2017 NFC Championship run, Griffen totaled a career high 13 sacks while Robison rotated with a young upstart in his third season, Danielle Hunter. 2017 was Hunter’s breakout year, earning 9 sacks and an extension of his own the following offseason despite two quiet years to start his career.

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Back in the 1970s, Matt Blair and Fred McNeill waited in the wings while the Purple People Eaters devoured quarterbacks. In 1976, 3rd year Matt Blair took over for the retiring Roy Winston, and eventually became a primary pass rusher in place of Carl Eller. Fred McNeill followed a similar path as the Vikings transitioned to a 3-4 in the 1980s.

Any lifetime football fan has seen this story play out. A young player joins, waits in the wings, then takes over when the starter steps aside. Now, that young player is Dallas Turner.

Turner spent the first two years of his career buried behind Jonathan Greenard and Andrew Van Ginkel. In the five games where both Greenard and Van Ginkel were fully healthy, Turner averaged 26.8 defensive snaps (41.7%). In games with at least one of the starters on the injury report, Turner averaged 47.3 snaps (75.5%)

In his rookie season, Turner was so buried that Brian Flores had to try to explain it away:

Twitter tweet

After Rob Brzezinski traded Jonathan Greenard to Philadelphia on draft weekend, he admitted he wasn’t “jumping around excitedly” about losing his best defensive player for two 3rd round picks. Brzezinski appealed to the Vikings’ financial situation, presenting the deal as a value proposition the Vikings were priced into.

It’s worth mentioning that fellow Wide Leftist Matt Fries had very little trouble keeping Greenard on the roster, resetting the cap, and keeping flexibility for the future. An extension similar to what Philadelphia gave Greenard would have fit snugly into Fries’ plan.

The key difference is that Fries relied on several contract restructures, which require cash spending. Brzezinski insisted that cash spending wasn’t a limitation, nor was limiting cash spending a motivation, but that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

The most charitable conclusion I can come up with is that the Vikings felt Greenard would not be worth the money he was asking for. But even that does not try to sell some Dallas Turner improvement as a motivating factor. 

Turner did not get a mention in Brzezinski’s defense of the deal.

By at least omission, the Vikings acknowledge that they have gotten worse on the whole by moving from Greenard to Turner, and are asking us to forgive them because of the liquid assets it provided.

For what it’s worth to you, Greenard emphatically believes in Turner, comparing his situation to Will Anderson’s, who took over for Greenard in Houston.

Should we believe Greenard? Can Dallas Turner make the Vikings his team? 

The Jonathan Greenard Power Vacuum

Greenard is right about one thing: this was his team for the last two years. 

Greenard leads the team in pressures by a mile, but it’s worth noting that he also rushed the passer much more than anyone else. That’s because he never came off the field like Turner did, but also because he is the focal point of the Vikings’ pass rush strategy.

Dallas Turner posted a respectable 42 pressures in 2025, but Greenard still outproduced him, despite missing five games with a shoulder injury and playing injured for more. 

Turner will need to become a more productive rusher than he was last year in order to fill Greenard’s shoes. To understand how that can happen, we need to understand pass rushes better in general.

Twitter tweet

In the NFL, pass rushes aren’t simply a series of one-on-one matchups. You’re not regularly telling players to pin their ears back and win. Defenses want to exploit mismatches and manage the quarterback’s escape lanes.

Below is a screenshot from an old Fangio playbook from his days in Chicago. This was Chicago’s base defensive system. It’s not what the Vikings are running under Flores, but it serves as an adequate example to learn the collective basics.

Got all that?

Highlighting the important parts in orange and blue, you can think of the Rip/Liz as a strong side/weak side identifier. “Rip” identifies the right side as the strong side, “Liz” identifies the left.

So if you are “to Rip/Liz” that just means you are on the side with more passing threats. A back end defender — the “green dot,” if you will — relays this as part of the play call.

Color coding to help. Orange is the strong side, blue is the weak side.

Note that the strongside end (think Jalen Redmond for the current Vikings) must take an inside rush lane. The nose must rush away from the strength. The weak side end and the 4th rushing outside linebacker both have contain responsibilities.

Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images

Sandwiched between two lakes in the Fort Worth, TX area, a fourth grader was on a tear. Around 2007, elementary school science teacher Michael Staten decided to introduce fourth-grade student Kyler M. to chess. His classmates could not unseat him. 

Kyler Murray was one of those kids that won at everything. He was hyper-competitive and hyper-athletic, which meant that whether you were playing Connect 4 or high school football, Murray would be a force.

He holds his place as a Texas High School football legend. He once fell behind 28-10 before rattling off six straight touchdown drives. He’d regularly turn dead lost situations into explosive plays. 

He is one of very few athletes who could excel at multiple sports at the collegiate level. He is one of two athletes in history to be drafted in the first round in two of the major four professional sports leagues.

The Las Vegas Athletics, who were the Oakland Athletics when they drafted Murray, would still welcome him to the team.

Now, Murray finds himself released by the team that drafted him and subject to a quarterback competition with J.J. McCarthy.

Every other elite athlete, with the exception of Scott Burrell in the 1990s, had to focus all of their energy on one sport to excel at it. So how did Murray break that mold? How can you be that good at everything? And how can it suddenly fall apart?

In 2022, at the peak of a season that was about to collapse, Kyler Murray bragged that he can play without spending as much time as his peers watching film. He’d walk this back after it blew up in his face, but I think he really meant it. “It’s Easy” is still his bio, even as the 2022 season collapsed and Murray would never lead the Cardinals back to the playoffs. 

The best way to get into Murray’s mind might not be on the football field, but rather, over the chessboard. 

BlitzChamps

Every year, Chess.com hosts a charity exhibition tournament for professional athletes called BlitzChamps. Murray has participated every year since the 2nd edition of Blitzchamps, placing highly in each of the last three years. On May 26th, Blitzchamps V wrapped up with Kyler Murray losing to Justin Herbert in the semifinal, and again in the loser’s final.

Fittingly, these events use a Blitz format. That means each player has only three minutes total to play the game out. Players don’t have time for concrete calculation and have to act on instinct and principle. Which makes it perfect for Kyler Murray’s approach.

Murray prefers to play the Italian Game as white. It starts with a pawn move to e4 followed by developing a bishop and knight. With two centralized pieces and the option to castle quickly unlocked, it gives Murray a lot of tools. 

It’s popular for a reason. It’s one of the most well-covered openings in chess. That means there is a lot of opportunity to memorize the ins and outs and gain an advantage in a format where every second to think is precious.

Kyler Murray does not do this.

Here is how this year’s elimination game against Justin Reid kicked off. Reid beat Murray in the championship for both of the last two years, so he had his work cut out for him.

The Italian Game opening! Sort of!

Experienced chess players will notice a problem here: Reid played the Sicilian. The Sicilian is insanely complicated, but it always starts with black playing C5. Playing that same bishop move in the start is no longer called the Italian Game. Now, Kyler has played the Bowdler Attack, and it’s not a great idea. 

Reid’s pawn gets to freely control two squares, including d4, where the knight wants to go. Reid can also play e6 and blunt the bishop’s range of options. 

Justin Reid gets free real estate if he goes to freerealestateforjim.biz

That’s not how this game goes down, but it’s revealing that Kyler Murray will stick to his series of Italian Game moves, even when they are universally understood as a bad idea. Italian Game players usually have a specific response to the Sicilian that they’ll play instead of their main strategy. 

Think of it like lining up a short cornerback against a tall receiver. You can win sometimes, but you’ll be at an objective disadvantage, and you may want to think about rotating your defensive backs a different way. 

Every chess game eventually gets to its own unique position, never played before (it’s a cool math thing, we don’t have time). This uncharted territory is where Kyler is clearly more comfortable.

Here, he lays a trap. He moves his queen to f3, separating it from the knight on d4. On its surface, it looks like he blundered something juicy.

Wow, that block of cheese under that cardboard box propped up by a stick looks great

Reid could follow the path laid out above by taking the knight on d4, then the pawn on c2. That would put the king in check, forcing Murray to waste a move running away while Reid took the rook on a1.

It’s too good to be true!

Double question marks means very bad!

While Reid snatches up what he thinks is a free knight, his pawn on f7 is in dire straits. See that white bar on the left side? That’s a sort of win probability meter. You will notice it is entirely white. Murray can now take the f7 pawn with his queen, put the king in check, and the only legal move for Reid is to slide the king to d8.

Kyler Murray still plays a game or two of Blitz chess, or the even faster Bullet chess, once or twice per day.

After that, the queen can continue her rampage, take the bishop, and that’s checkmate. Kyler Murray wins. Justin Reid goes home. Reid had to resist that free knight and deal with the problem on f7 to continue the game normally. 

In the early game of chess, “attack the f7 pawn” is a good principle. In blitz chess, you have to rely on those principles to find opportunities like the one Murray takes advantage of. Keep that mentality in mind.

There is a limit to how much you can accomplish without memorizing opening theory. Playing fast chess on vibes works, but it can only carry you so far.

This is why I’m bringing up this random chess game. Murray displayed a lack of study for a player at his level, but found a way to win in the chaos of the middle game. Kyler Murray thrives in chaos. So much so that he invites it.

That’s the Kyler Murray quote that got him in so much trouble in 2021. Much like Kevin O’Connell, who dropped his infamous “organizations fail young quarterbacks” quote in 2024 after a 3-0 start, Murray was taking something of a victory lap. The Cardinals were 10-4 and leading the NFC West when this article got published, and Murray was in the MVP conversation.  

Never take a victory lap.

The Cardinals finished that season losing 4 of 5, lost the division and bounced right out of the playoffs in the Wild Card round. As Kyler’s play declined, that quote came back up. Similar to O’Connell, the quote doesn’t sting you until people are mad at your performance.

It aptly describes his chess, based on my extremely amateur ability to analyze 1200-1300 level blitz games. Does it describe his football game as well?

How To Improvise Like Kyler Murray

We’re Switching to Beehiiv!

Now that we’ve entered the dead zone of the NFL offseason, Wide Left has the ability to make some changes we’ve been planning for some time now. The biggest such change is moving our publication from Substack to Beehiiv.

In the short term, this should mean no changes for you, the reader. You’ll continue to receive emails with updated analysis and news, formatted in a slightly different way because of the change in platform.

In the long term, we hope to add new features to the site to provide a bit more for subscribers. Is that why we made the change? In part, but not entirely.

To help support us in this switch, consider subscribing at a discounted rate!

Switching Platforms

We don’t always have the luxury of choosing what systems we need to interact with in order to thrive. That’s true in business as well as in everyday life; we might make a decision to avoid Amazon but still find ourselves interacting with an exploitative supply chain for our food. One might go to a locally owned clinic but still rely on behemoth-sized insurance companies and global pharmaceuticals in order to acquire necessary medicine.

Indeed, the very infrastructure of the internet we rely on requires the use of these mega corporations whose values don’t align with mine; “Tier 1” networks are generally the networks that build the backbone of the internet. Owners of this infrastructure don’t charge transit fees to each other but do charge carriage fees for other networks to use their pipes.

They are unavoidable, and it’s the case that I need to use AT&T, Lumen, Verizon or other such networks at some point in the chain if I want to run an internet business. Or exist at all. These networks lobby governments around the world in order to maintain their monopolies, fund far-right media operations, cooperate with illegal government surveillance regimes and lobby to destroy a fair, neutral internet.

The leftist canard that “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is not to suggest that one shouldn’t try to make ethical choices whenever possible, but rather that one is constrained and that even the most ethical consumption decisions have ethical baggage; we need to focus on systems rather than individual choices when we want to forge ethical pathways forward.

This is why I’m not (generally) upset when other creators take on sponsors or make content decisions that I avoid; we all deal with different constraints and have different audiences that define our decision pathway. On top of that, many of us have teams or employees to watch out for and cannot just make decisions that impact only ourselves.

But, sometimes, we get the choice to measurably improve our impact on the world. Here, we get to leave Substack for Beehiiv.

The Ethics of Our Infrastructure

So, why would leaving Substack constitute that kind of ethical choice we rarely get to make? For different people, there may be different answers. There are a few reasons. I’ve always been uncomfortable with Substack’s ownership structure, with a16z — also known as Andreessen Horowitz — likely the largest institutional investor that owns somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of Substack.

But before we get into Andreessen Horowitz, we can talk a little bit about how the platform itself operates.

Many people have decided to leave Substack because they’ve consistently platformed — here meaning both “provided a platform” to, in a literal sense, as well as the more colloquial sense of “boosting” such content — Nazis.

Something I often encounter when I see people discuss “Nazis” in contemporary politics is eyerolling and an assumption that commentators are exaggerating or conflating more acceptable political worldviews with an almost cartoonish avatar of evil. Godwin’s Law.

But, that’s not really the case here. Self-described Nazis are on the platform. People who call themselves white nationalists, white supremacists, race realists and National Socialists are on the platform, making money for themselves and Andreessen Horowitz by denying the Holocaust.

It’s more than just hosting the platform; Substack had actually sent a push notification to unsubscribed users for a publication that describes itself as “National Socialist weekly newsletter featuring opinions and news important to the National Socialist and White Nationalist Community.”

In response to this, Substack apologized for sending that push notification but not for hosting or profiting from that content. They argued for “free speech absolutism,” an odd stance for a corporation to take regarding its own platform rather than one that applies to, say, governments.

In response, they said, “But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetising publications) makes the problem go away – in fact, it makes it worse."

This is the dream of institutional liberals and maximalist libertarians: that open and free dialogue reduces extremist impulses. The evidence suggests overwhelmingly that this is not the case. Deplatforming reduces the reach and spread of extremist ideology. While some research suggests that migration to alternate platforms increases radicalization of some individual banned users, even as they do not find an audience to spread their violent ideologies, the net effect on banned users is moderation.

So, in short, no. This is a flimsy excuse to continue making money by profiting off of extremists. This year, Andrew Tate joined the platform and became a bestseller.

But there are other reasons to be concerned about Substack’s affiliation with right-wing extremism.

Marc Andreessen, one of the two billionaires who owns Andreessen Horowitz, recently went viral for claiming that introspection is a modern invention that holds people back. Aside from the fact that introspection is the basis of all modern philosophy in every cultural tradition dating back thousands of years, it’s also a shockingly worrying advocacy for someone who controls the platform I publish from.

That, along with what he himself calls “AI Accelerationism,” is enough for me to feel uncomfortable — but neither of these is enough substance for me to spend time talking about him specifically in the context of leaving the platform he partially owns.

Instead, it’s how his “techno-optimism” serves eugenics and a deeply conservative politics. He published a manifesto on this worldview and in it, he draws on a number of futurist philosophers and writers throughout history. He includes a citation list at the bottom of his manifesto, and in it, he encourages people to read (among others) Italian fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

Again, this isn’t an exaggeration; Marinetti was a co-author of the Fascist Manifesto in 1919. In his Manifesto of Futurism, he says “We will glorify war — the only true hygiene of the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, the beautiful Ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman.”

He also adds “We will destroy museums, libraries and fight against moralism, feminism and all utilitarian cowardice.”

His Futurist Political Party merged with Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascist Party in 1919 and continued to develop party philosophy through the 1920s.

His work is echoed in Andreessen’s screed, where he argues that social responsibility is an ill that needs to be wiped out for society to progress:

Throughout the manifesto, Andreessen continues to make unproven arguments, some bordering on the absurd — like the claim that people act only for “love,” “money,” or “force,” a claim wholly unsupported by any studies of human behavior.

Worryingly, Andreessen vaguely gestures at his eugenic tendencies in the piece when he talks about “Becoming Technological Supermen,” but we’ve seen him substantiate these beliefs more explicitly in other fora, like in a podcast where he talks about IQ engineering and eugenics in response to the “population crisis.”

He also, including in his manifesto, heartily recommends accelerationist Nick Land — a contributor to Curtis Yarvin’s “Dark Enlightenment” philosophy, one that dispenses with notions like democracy and consent of the governed for a monarchical libertarian future. It has been characterized accurately as techno-feudalism and neo-Fascism.

This isn’t a game of trying to connect dots from one thinker to another; aside from the fact that Andreessen directly recommends Land’s work on this technofeudalism, he also recommends Yarvin’s work as part of his futurist philosophy.

Sometimes, we can’t help but put money in the pockets of people who will turn around to use it to make our lives worse. But this time, Wide Left gets to make the choice to avoid this particular pitfall in this specific way.

 Beehiiv is not wholly independent and has received investment from venture capital firms — no one is free from this particular sin in the modern economy — but, as far as I can tell, ownership is diffuse enough among private equity and venture capital firms that the impact is relatively minimal.

The concern with platforms owned in part by a16z (Andreessen) or the Founders Fund (Peter Thiel) is that they funnel money directly into political projects designed to rob us of our rights. Beehiiv’s investor list, which constitutes far smaller ownership shares than Andreessen Horowitz has in Substack, is not ideologically pure; Lightspeed also invests in the defense industry, and so does NEA.

But it is a big move away from some of the most serious concerns I’ve had with Substack. Not only is significantly less subscriber money going to these firms (more on that below), but the impact each dollar has with regard to my primary ideological concerns is minuscule by comparison.

It’s absolutely crazy that Curtis Yarvin allowed the New Yorker to take this … vanity? … image of him. Bizarre framing, composition and intention with this image of a neo-fascist. Photograph by Carolyn Drake for The New Yorker

Non-Ideological Reasons

There are other reasons to move on from Substack, too. Speaking purely as a writer evaluating the platform's structure, it is fairly good for people starting out; Substack charges a 10% fee for every paid subscriber — easily absorbable early on — and has powerful network effects that connect like-minded writers and their readers across populations. It’s great for growth in a number of ways.

It’s also a fairly turnkey solution; one can get started writing immediately without worrying about needing the technical knowledge and design instincts to put together a functioning, easy-to-use website for writers and readers.

Beehiiv approached Wide Left a while ago about moving our newsletter to their platform. Even before they approached us, we had discussions about moving our publication to Beehiiv or another platform for both technical and ethical reasons.

It wasn’t a good time for that, however, and we still needed to engage with economic reality.

Substack’s biggest draw for newsletter writers is their recommendation engine; when people sign up for our newsletter, they receive recommendations to subscribe to others based on the publications I specifically recommend and similar newsletters in the network based on what other subscribers have signed up for.

These network effects are significant for a newsletter like ours; a sizable portion of our readership comes from recommendations through other Substack newsletters. One must always be aware of where one’s data comes from, but Substack’s internal analytics indicate that about 25 percent of our paying subscribers came through their network.

In short, I need to eat.

That’s primarily the answer to why we wouldn’t have done that before, despite Substack’s well-known issues. Even now, Wide Left runs on debt.

If you’d like to help us as we switch platforms, we would love your support!

But while Substack’s fee system is fine for smaller publications, it seemingly punishes growth. Beehiiv’s fee structure will save the publication thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.

There are some feature-side benefits to switching as well.

Substack is great for those who don’t want to be involved with the technical side of running a website, but those with a bit more technical knowledge or willingness to learn will find themselves held back. The element that makes it user-friendly can also limit it.

We want to offer more features and give our readers much more bang for their buck. We have a few ideas in mind but need to work on them before even promising that we can offer them in any real way. We couldn’t do that on Substack’s platform and the hope is that we can find a way to do that on Beehiiv.

We’ve also mentioned before that being a paid newsletter doesn’t preclude us from taking on ads. Substack doesn’t really have an internal ad network to use, while Beehiiv does. We’re in full control of those ads and we can avoid advertising for companies or newsletters that violate our values — when approached, it’s been almost entirely for prediction markets and gambling sites.

So, you may see some inserted ads going forward. But not from Kalshi.

There will be some technical hiccups as we transition all the content over to the new platform. If you encounter one, please let us know.

Despite these up-front benefits, there is a long-term risk. We hope to build the kind of site that readers want to return to again and again to pay off that risk.

Thanks for following along.

[Editor’s Note: This is a continuation of Matt Fries’ Mock Free Agency Part 1, which you can find here]

Minnesota Vikings interim GM Rob Brzezinski will have his work cut out for him as he tries to improve the roster. The team has several holes and is well over the salary cap for 2026. The NFL has finalized its salary cap at $301.2 million for the 2026 season, which means the Vikings are $45.5 million over the cap, per OverTheCap.

To be fair, the team can easily move money around to get cap compliant, and Wide Left has covered how the Vikings can get under the cap, which impending free agents the team should keep, and what needs the team will have heading into free agency. This piece will combine those moves and dive into available outside free agents, creating a full mock free agency for the team.

Author’s Note: I want this exercise to be as realistic as possible, but it is not necessarily a prediction. In some of these situations, I’m suggesting a move the team is unlikely to make, but it’s the better choice. There are many winding paths, and at some point, you just have to make a decision. Information on the salary cap and existing contracts comes from OTC. For contract projections, I projected the structures myself, but I used multiple resources to determine contract values, including PFF’s projections by Josh Queipo, The Athletic’s projections by Daniel Popper, and, when those were missing, player value judgments from OTC and Spotrac.

Table of Contents

• Filling Out the Roster, Part 1: Re-signings

• Filling Out the Roster, Part 2: The QB Decision

• Filling Out the Roster, Part 3: Free Agency Additi …

• Final Roster and Cap Implications

Filling Out the Roster, Part 1: Re-signings

Jalen Nailor #1 of the Minnesota Vikings celebrates after his receiving touchdown against the Dallas Cowboys during the fourth quarter at AT&T Stadium on December 14, 2025, in Arlington, Texas. (Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images)

As can be seen above, the Vikings have several free agents. While they don’t have many starters leaving, there are a few players who will be critical to re-sign. I’m projecting they retain 11 players total, all of whom are rosterable in 2026.

There are a few rosterable players that I’m choosing not to re-sign, but I could see bringing them back as bottom-of-the-roster players.

Re-sign WR Jalen Nailor for 3 years, $21 million

Salary Cap Impact: $4,333,333 mil in 2026, $5,333,333 mil in 2027, $11,333,33 mil in 2028

Nailor was one of the most difficult projections in this entire piece. The different resources I used have his contract projections all over the map. PFF has him ranked as the 12th-best WR on the market, 114th overall among free agents, and projects him to get a one-year, $3.5 million deal.

The Athletic has him ranked fifth among receivers and 29th overall, earning a three-year, $36 million deal. OTC lists his value at just over $7 million, while Spotrac lists him at just under $5 million.

I like what Nailor brings to the receiver room: he can play all three positions, is a willing blocker, gets off the press, and threatens defenses vertically. But Nailor’s production lags far behind, and he never eclipsed 500 yards or 30 receptions with the Vikings. Even KJ Osborn, who got just $4 million in free agency, had three consecutive seasons of 500+ yards for the Vikings.

ome team could well take a chance on Nailor at the $12 million/year The Athletic projects, but it’s fair to split the valuations and project a three-year, $21 million deal for Nailor. This offers a nice pay bump while not overextending for a player who will be the team’s WR3.

For structure, I’m giving Nailor a $7 million signing bonus and $12 million fully guaranteed over the first two years of the deal. This will mean a $2 million salary in 2026 and a $3 million salary in 2027. The Vikings will have an opportunity to get out of the contract at that point, but if Nailor plays well (and, potentially, the team moves on from Addison), he can earn $9 million in 2028. So, the deal is a two-year, $12 million contract with a $9 million option.

If some other team chooses to bet big on Nailor, the other FA options at WR are questionable at best. My two favorites from the bargain bin are Tyquan Thornton and Jahan Dotson. Dotson seems to be entirely overlooked, as neither PFF nor The Athletic has him ranked in the top 150. Dotson was the fifth wheel in a loaded Eagles skill group, much like Nailor was the forgotten man at times on the Vikings.

Running 2026 Operating Cap Space Tally: $34,619,734

Re-sign LB Eric Wilson for 2 years, $10 million

Salary Cap Impact: $3,250,000 mil in 2026, $6,750,000 mil in 2027

Wilson is another tricky projection, as he suddenly broke out with the Vikings in his ninth season at 31 years old. His production was dependent on Brian Flores’ scheme, where he was an incredible blitzer.

So, Wilson might not translate well into other schemes. He is undersized compared to other LBs, like Kaden Elliss and Frankie Luvu, who have made names for themselves. The biggest risk is in Washington, if Daronte Jones wants to bring some of Flores’ scheme over and thinks Wilson can help teach other players.

Like with Nailor, the projections are split on Wilson. PFF ranks him egregiously low at 269th and does not have a contract projection for him. The Athletic has him getting a three-year, $19.5 million deal. My projection for Wilson is a two-year, $10 million deal that rewards a player who had a fantastic year on a small contract without breaking the bank.

This deal is similar to the one Jordan Hicks, an aging player at that time, signed with the Vikings in 2022. I’m giving Wilson a $2.5 million signing bonus, adding $2 million in salary in 2026, and $5.5 million to round out the contract in 2027. For the deal, I’ve projected $5 million guaranteed, which means there would be at least some pain, $500k, if the Vikings cut him before the 2027 season.

Running 2026 Operating Cap Space Tally: $32,254,734

On Sunday, Dan Duggan, The Athletic’s beat reporter for the New York Giants, penned a column to discuss the back-and-forth locker room drama surrounding quarterback Jaxson Dart’s decision to appear at a Trump rally and teammate Abdul Carter’s public objection.

Duggan’s column reflected a poison that has become an insidious part of sportswriting and has been for decades.

He led his column with three paragraphs of posturing about how he doesn’t care — or even know about — politics.

This is an abdication of one’s responsibilities as a citizen and as a sportswriter.

Initially, it might seem like his pure commitment to intentional ignorance is a retreat into being shielded from the consequences of weighty decision-making or public accountability. And it may very well be.

But more than that, it’s arrogance.

Counterintuitively, this kind of signaling is often meant to convey seriousness and intelligence; in this construction, politics is theater and frivolity. It is no different than looking down on people for liking pop music or reality television.

The fact that this is in service to something inarguably more frivolous than politics — sports — is hilarious.

Table of Contents:

• The Luxury of Apathy

• Bad Process is Bad Reporting

• Not Mere Theater

• “Objectivity” — A Systemic Poison 

The Luxury of Apathy

Nevertheless, there has been some discussion speculating that Duggan is “lying” about this stance of his and that he’s secretly a Trump supporter. I haven’t seen any evidence of that throughout his writing, even when sensitive topics like Colin Kaepernick come up, and I have no reason to think he isn’t writing what he believes to be true of himself.

The problem is that a political orientation of apathy prioritizes the status quo, an ultimately conservative instinct. While the current regime of conservative politics does more than maintain the system as-is — there’s a genuine attempt at rollback and move towards an imagined historical ideal — apathy reinforces power.

It is easy to ignore politics as a middle-class cis white man. It is more difficult for my trans friends, who are fighting for their lives every day for access to health care. It is tough to ignore politics when one has to choose between medication and food or when underlying systemic factors impact auto loans, mortgages, education, access to hospitals, law enforcement and hiring.

Duggan is enjoying the luxury not to care.

This column engages in what is essentially defensive writing. That itself is not a huge criticism; I often engage in defensive writing — pre-empting common criticisms or responses — in my opinion-forward columns. He wants to prevent readers from accusing him of writing the issue with bias that would otherwise cloud his analysis of the Giants locker room.

The issue is that the defensive argumentation has stolen the focus of the piece and disrupted the flow of the writing. It’s a slog to read, and there’s no momentum heading into the parts he wants to discuss. Three paragraphs of defense before ever hitting a point he actually wants to make.

Ostensibly, the intent of the piece was to discuss the locker room impact of having “big personalities” — a ridiculous framing — on one team. Instead, the reader comments are (or were, before moderation) primarily about Duggan’s stated non-stance. Was this the goal?

The rest of the piece is thin, but it’s not an entirely poor recap of the issues the Giants locker room might face with a roster prone to inviting in non-football news stories. It threads together unrelated news items and brings them into a cohesive conclusion that, while somewhat unremarkable, is still functionally within the scope of Duggan’s job.

Everyone who has written for the Athletic, me included, has written a piece that does this, and it would be ridiculous of me to exempt myself from the critique of a shallow, but reasonably well-constructed piece that would otherwise not make many waves when bringing together a useful set of shared concerns.

But there’s a reason this piece drew over 1,000 comments at The Athletic, despite there being several other pieces one could comment on for this event that have been directly fed to Giants fans. The comments are not about the common factors linking Carter, Dart, Malik Nabers and Cam Skattebo.

Bad Process is Bad Reporting

The moral cowardice of refusing to take a stance aside, this makes Dan a much less effective sports reporter. Without an understanding of why Dart took the risk of making a public stance or why a Black Muslim man might object to Dart’s support for a racist, Duggan can only report on the surface-level impact of these kinds of things.

Indeed, his third paragraph made it clear he didn’t expect to have to address this at all.

One is not a better journalist in any arena — sports, arts & entertainment, science, religion, lifestyle, business, cooking or even video games coverage — because one ignores the institutions that impact all of these systems in obvious and non-obvious ways.

Can one cover the games industry without talking about the spike in RAM prices? Can one discuss the types of food Americans eat without learning about agricultural subsidies? How are the costs of products impacted by oil prices and war in the Persian Gulf? How do tariffs impact fashion? Can we have a conversation about religion in the news while ignoring the Pope’s stance on American intervention? Can we do science journalism without understanding the extraordinary blow to science funding we’ve experienced? How can we discuss any entertainment at all if we don’t talk about the people who produce it?

These are all political questions, and while coverage of these newspaper sections can be done without this knowledge, one is, inarguably, a worse journalist without knowing about these things.

With the New York Giants specifically, anyone with any level of political insight would be able to detect that there was some possibility that Dart’s endorsement could cause strife in the locker room. There’d been endless discussion about the volatility of the first Trump election inside NFL locker rooms, with some banning discussion of the election because of how explosive it could become.

Without serious political interrogation, Duggan doesn’t have the ability to discern why players might find it objectionable or how they might feel the need to violate established norms of keeping “locker room issues” inside the locker room and address things publicly — outside of calling Carter a “big personality” or saying they have “political disagreements.”

This flattening of distinctions does not serve readers, despite Duggan’s suggestion that his ignorance benefits those wanting to learn more about the Giants. Why would a Black Muslim man feel that objecting to Trump was important enough to risk strife in a locker room?

Every year, the NFL brings in about 450 undrafted free agent rookies into training camp. About 45 of them make the roster the week prior to the NFL season. Even fewer make it to Week 1 as teams sign veterans to fill out the roster. In total, about nine percent of undrafted free agents make the opening-day roster.

That means about one or two per UDFA class for each team should make the roster, which is a bit higher than we typically see in 53-man roster projections. This doesn’t include the undrafted free agents who end up on practice squads only to make the roster later.

We know about the star stories — Adam Thielen, James Harrison, Tony Romo and Kurt Warner — but many UDFAs contribute in more ways than becoming leading stars at their position. Even more provide outstanding and critical rotational value or do meaningful work on special teams.

Key starters like Reed Blankenship, Ronnie Hickman, Jalen Sundell, Charvarius Ward, Alaric Jackson, Rashid Shaheed and Carl Granderson join essential role players like Jalen Coker, Jordan Mason, Emmanuel Wilson, Gage Larvadain, Nazir Stackhouse and Danny Strigow as important undrafted contributors for their respective teams.

That’s not to mention a bevy of special teamers, who include Devon Key, Del’Shawn Phillips, Jeremy Reaves, Joe Andreessen, George Odum, Jake Hansen and Brenden Schooler.

We know that undrafted free agents play a critical part in putting together a winning team, but the nature of UDFAs — teams generally didn’t think they were even good enough to draft — makes them difficult to predict.

Nevertheless, we’ve got some key clues: guaranteed money and the Consensus Big Board.

Roster-Make Rates

Every so often, you might see a graphic on a television broadcast or online showcasing how important UDFAs are to roster construction that can be interpreted incorrectly by those presenting the data or those looking at it without context.

Some broadcasters use this to say that you’re more likely to make an impact as a UDFA than as a seventh-round pick, which really isn’t the case. There are more UDFAs on rosters than there are in any Day Three pick group, as you can see.

In the example above, Yahoo! Sports’ Jay Busbee does bring up why this is the case – more than ten times as many UDFAs sign with teams than are drafted in any particular round – but still quotes former Jets general manager Mike Tannenbaum as saying, “You could make the argument that not getting drafted is better than going in later rounds.”

In either case, we can do better – we can use post-training camp cutdown rosters to estimate make rates for each individual round and compare them to the UDFA population.

From there, we can estimate how much guaranteed money and pre-draft acclaim can help us predict which undrafted free agents are most likely to end up on a roster or make an impact.

I gathered 2018 to 2024 data on the roster-make percentage on cutdown day for each draft round. This data isn’t completely definitive; it treats those put on injured reserve as “misses,” which means that players like Jameson Williams and J.J. McCarthy didn’t “make” their teams.

Nevertheless, it’s useful because injury risk is (mostly) evenly distributed across rounds, even though you’d expect players with injury concerns to be drafted later.

If we look at data from 2021 to 2025, the roster-make rate for UDFAs has slightly risen to 9.5 percent, but this is a pretty good baseline to work from.

But that’s all it is, just a baseline. We know that teams put much more stock in some undrafted free agents than others. Using guaranteed money, we might be able to predict which players have the best odds of making the roster.

Combining that with the consensus rank of those UDFAs gives us an even better model for figuring out which players have the best odds of making the roster.

Validating the Approach

Is the model any good? It turned out to be pretty good in 2025 and has been fairly predictive for several years running.

Last year, ten percent of the undrafted free agent class — 46 of 460 players — were given roster-make estimates between 18.0 and 25.0 percent, for an average roster-make rate of 19.9 percent. In order to approximately meet that mark, we’d need nine (9.2) of them to make the roster on opening day.

That’s exactly what happened; Brandon Crenshaw-Dickson (Titans), Bam Martin-Scott (Panthers), Benjamin Yurosek (Vikings), Max Brosmer (Vikings), Beaux Collins (Giants), Efton Chism III (Patriots), Karene Reid (Broncos), Torricelli Simpkins III (Saints), and Johnathan Edwards (Colts) all made their respective team rosters.

152 of the free agents were given a five percent chance or less of making the roster for an average estimated roster-make rate of 3.5 percent. That gives us an expected value of five (5.3) players making their rosters. Six of them did, further validating the exercise.

Those six — Keyon Martin (Ravens), Rueben Lowery III (Ravens), Cooper McDonald (Chiefs), Marlow Wax (Chargers), Myles Price (Vikings) and John Bullock (Buccaneers) — put in outstanding efforts to personally beat the odds.

At a large scale, however, the numbers are what they are. Guarantees tell us what teams think of a player’s talent level and the Consensus Board seemingly gives us an eye into talent level that teams may have missed.

This holds up over a larger sample — from 2021 to 2025, there were 166 players given roster-make rates between 25.0 percent and 18.0 percent and 36 of them made the opening-day roster (21.7 percent). The estimated number (34) and rate (20.5 percent) was very close.

Which Matters More? Money or Rank?

These models only estimate likelihood and cannot provide certainties. Players without significant guaranteed money or acclaim from analysts make rosters every year.

Last year, six unranked players made rosters. Three were mentioned above — Martin (Ravens), Lowery (Ravens) and McDonald (Chiefs) — and three more earned high guarantees, giving them better odds. They were Darius Cooper Jr. (Eagles), Nick Kallerup (Seahawks) and Ale Kaho (Commanders). Martin, Lowery and McDonald earned nothing in guaranteed money while Kaho ($75,000), Cooper ($90,000) and Kallerup ($259,000) earned significant guarantees.

Now that we’re in the dead of the offseason, it’s time to break down the long-awaited 2027 NFL Draft class. My excitement for this class has been building for two years, and it took a lot of restraint to avoid looking ahead, but I can finally lean back from the edge of my seat and dive in.

I’ve completed evaluations of the consensus top ten, which I’ll break down in depth for this piece. I don’t put a lot of stock in the early preseason consensus, but it’s a good starting point to introduce the class.

While there are some players I’m lower on, the 2027 Class, as a whole, has lived up to the hype. Of the ten players I evaluated for this article, I have first-round grades on each of the top eight, and early second-round grades on the last two.

The top of the board is mostly comprised of young, athletic, former five-star recruits who already have a year or two of production under their belts. Compared to the last two years, 2027 is teeming with blue-chip talent; however, I’m only 80 players in, so I don’t yet have a strong sense of the class's depth.

Where Do I Rank the Consensus Top Ten?

1. WR Jeremiah Smith - Ohio State

Consensus Rank: 1
My Rank: 1
Grade: Top 5
Biggest Strength: Size + Speed
Biggest Weakness: Intermediate Route Running
NFL Comp: Andre Johnson

Jeremiah Smith is an imposing X with a generational combo of size, speed, and explosiveness. Since 2024, he has led FBS WRs in receiving yards (2,558), touchdowns (27), first downs (101), EPA (140.5), 25+ yard receptions (27), and yards/route run (3.44). His change-of-direction skills are mediocre, as expected for a receiver of his size, but it’s almost impossible to overstate his physical tools or linear athleticism.

Smith launches off the line of scrimmage and into vertical stems, stacking the DB early and extending separation with long strides. He’s unfazed by contact, but would benefit from refining his footwork and release package. At the catch point, Smith has outstanding focus, ball-tracking skills, and hand-eye coordination. He has an enormous catch radius to secure off-target throws and makes one-handed catches look easy. On 211 career targets, he has just three drops (1.8%). He also does a great job of establishing late catch space to win jump balls down the sideline:

Though Smith will immediately be a matchup weapon on the vertical plane and at the catch point, he has room to grow as an intermediate route runner. He weaponizes his size at the top of routes, bullying defenders out of phase with push-offs and wipes. Until referees start calling OPI, there’s no reason to abandon this strategy, but he’s still too dependent on physicality and athleticism to separate.

His abrupt deceleration allows him to separate on stops and comebacks, slightly expanding his route tree. He’s much more effective disguising his breaks than setting them up, however. He runs stems with his eyes/head facing the end zone to avoid telegraphing his route, but his nuance and salesmanship at the break point are underdeveloped. As a bigger receiver, he also struggles at times to cleanly transition on more complex routes.

2. QB Arch Manning - Texas

Consensus Rank: 2
My Rank: 2
Grade: Top 5
Biggest Strength: Pocket Presence
Biggest Weakness: Accuracy
NFL Comp: Drake Maye as a prospect

Arch Manning’s preseason hype came to a screeching halt after his Week 1 performance vs. Ohio State. But while everyone turned their attention to other quarterback prospects, Manning quietly developed and rebuilt his stock. Over the second half of 2025, he began to play like the premier quarterback prospect he was billed as.

Manning is a tall, sturdy pocket passer with ideal physical tools for the NFL. His arm strength (range) is above average, and he complements that with a quick release; he can generate enough velocity to pierce tight windows. He’s a true dual-threat with breakaway speed, contact balance, and elusiveness in the open field. Texas fully unleashed him as a runner late in the year, and he recorded 223 of his 519 rushing yards in the final two games.

He’s a clean processor who can get his eyes to the backside and hit his second or third read. When given time to hang in the pocket, Manning consistently diced up zone coverage and moved the chains on third down. He uses his eyes to manipulate second-level defenders, expand/shift passing lanes, and create openings vs. tight coverage.

But he’s still a bit too slow and methodical getting through his reads and will need to accelerate his process at the next level. Learning to eliminate options pre-snap will allow him to get ahead of the progression and target zone coverage with better timing. He’s fearless attacking the sideline vs. Cover-2, and has the perfect blend of touch and velocity to layer hole shots into concealed windows. He’ll throw with anticipation when the picture is clear, but is at times hesitant to attack tight windows over the middle of the field.

Decision-making was a problem early in the season, but it became a clear strength down the stretch. Manning had 14 turnover-worthy plays and 5 interceptions over the first six games, but only three turnover-worthy plays and two interceptions in the final seven. He eventually struck a healthy balance between playing aggressively and protecting the football, and by the end of the year, I had full trust in his decision-making.

Manning’s pocket movement is exceptional. He remains calm and composed when the pocket heats up, but still operates with enough urgency to beat the shot clock. He takes strong pocket climbs, shrugging off edge pressure with his eyes downfield and finding a clean launch point. He can dodge interior pressure or rip out of arm tackles, and is a very difficult quarterback to bring down. In 2025, he faced 165 pressured dropbacks (6th most in FBS) but had only a 13.3% pressure-to-sack rate.

Manning’s accuracy and mechanics must improve for him to reach his upside. He posted a ≤ 60% completion rate in seven of his thirteen starts last year, and while drops slightly deflated his production, the tape and advanced metrics show Manning deserves plenty of the blame.

According to Sports Info Solutions, he had a 66.3% on-target rate in 2025, which ranked in the 20th percentile among FBS quarterbacks. He has pinpoint accuracy to the intermediate sideline, but very little command of ball placement to other parts of the field. He sails short/intermediate passes over the middle and threw a couple of digs directly to the free safety. Pressure causes his footwork to unravel and leads to brutal misses at every level.

He throws a very catchable deep ball, but his placement is imprecise. On 25+ air yard throws, his on-target rate (39.5%) ranked 81st of 111, but his catchable rate (67.4%) ranked 37th. So he doesn’t have a ton of egregious misses downfield, but he needs receivers who can track and adjust to the ball. His ball placement is also scattershot when throwing on the move or from an unorthodox arm slot, and significantly worse to his left. Last year, he was on-target on 20/27 movement throws to his right, but just 5/19 to his left, according to Sports Info Solutions.

3. QB Dante Moore - Oregon

Welcome to the landing page for the Consensus Big Board for the 2026 NFL Draft. As often as possible, I’ve tried to provide it free, without subscription, to as many people as possible.

To that end, this piece is free to everyone, as is the data.

The insights generated from the board, which include analyses such as who the most polarizing players are in the draft, the difference between evaluators and forecasters, and post-draft team grades, will continue to be subscriber exclusives. This page will serve as a hub for those pieces, so you can find them if you feel the need.

• Why Use This Consensus Board?

• Using the Consensus Board to Find the Most Polarizing Players in the 2026 NFL Draft

• Forecasters and Evaluators: What’s the Difference and Why Does it Matter?

• The Consensus Big Board Grades the 2026 NFL Draft

• Ranking the 2026 UDFA Classes with the Consensus Big Board

From two years ago:

• Which Draft Analysts Predict the Draft the Best? Who’s Right on Players? And is the Consensus Board any Good?

Even if those pieces don’t strike you as appealing, I would urge a subscription to keep efforts like this running; this project takes dozens of hours every year and many of the boards in use are proprietary and behind paywalls.

What Makes This Consensus Board Different?

There are, by now, a half-dozen or so consensus boards out there. In some respects, they are more useful than this one – many of them have been running throughout the season, giving us a good barometer for a player’s stock and giving fans a genuine look at the players they might want to pay attention to during bowl games.

They also happen to be more focused, with particular emphasis on big-media boards, preventing unorthodox and uninformed rankings from polluting the system.

But I believe there’s a lot of value in this board, too. Every year, I’ve been able to gather anywhere between 50 and 90 big boards to provide a larger survey on the industry’s feelings about prospects in the draft.

For more on that topic, check out the piece below.

This year, we’ve gathered over 100 boards and anticipate having at least 115 by the time the draft rolls around.

We’ve been able to use the size of that data to leverage unique insights, like the ones described above. Using just ten boards wouldn’t give us a meaningful understanding of variance in player rankings and they don’t have the ability to split boards by type.

The boards used in this ranking are all updated in the month of April — some consensus boards take the average of all boards, including ones from the same analyst multiple times over many months — something I try to avoid.

On top of that, there’s also value in the approach I take to the board, which isn’t to average out the ranks across the industry but to average out the implied player values. There is admittedly more transparency in the approach that averages out player ranks across big boards, but it has the unfortunate side effect of suggesting that the difference between 145th and 147th is the same as the difference between 1st and 3rd.

In the NFL draft, that’s not how player ranks or player value works – the decision to rank a player first is a big decision; it signifies that teams should be willing to move heaven and earth to acquire that kind of player. That’s not the case at 145th.

Often, players ranked between 145th and 147th aren’t all that different. But the differences between the two are treated as the same in most consensus methods.

There’s also typically no accounting for player absences in boards. We can demonstrate this using an example, assuming we have 100 analysts ranking players 1 to 100. Not every analyst will rank the same 100 players and most leave players on the cutting room floor that others have decided to put in their top 100.

In this example, Player A is ranked by 50 boards as the 75th-best player in the draft and unranked on the other 50. Player B is ranked by all 100 boards as the 76th-best player. Most approaches to consensus boards will rank Player A as the better player, even though the average opinion on that player is that he is worse than Player B, not better.

This particular board, with its points-based averaging approach and varying penalties for absences on different-sized boards, avoids that problem, at least partially.

The data below is downloadable using a link at the bottom (labeled “Get the data”) and the 300 players are separated into three 100-player pages; an arrow in the upper-right can help you navigate between them. The table is also searchable and sortable.

Over the next week, the table will be updated to include ranks from two different groups of analysts (“Forecasters” and “Evaluators”) as well as the overall rank by consensus. At the moment, it only shows the consensus rank. It will also be updated in the coming days to include rank-adjusted variance, a score that tells us how polarizing the players in the draft are.

If you want a printable Google Sheet, click here (this will also be updated until the day of the draft).

Data Visualizations

Below we have a few data visualizations of the Consensus Big Board. Hopefully, these will help you understand some of the concepts we’ve been discussing, especially regarding variance. The first chart is a rank-adjusted variance chart, plotting players by their Consensus Big Board rank and their rank-adjusted variance, so you get a sense for how much disagreement the player drew relative to where they are on the big board.

The rank variance between Fernando Mendoza and Peter Woods is comparable when accounting for the fact that Mendoza ranks first and Woods ranks 26th, but the absolute range of rankings on Mendoza (generally first through seventh, with the outliers hitting 35th) is much narrower than the absolute range of rankings for Woods (generally 21st through 36th, though outliers hit between 3rd and 95th).

There’s another way to visualize the distribution of ranks, and this one makes no adjustment for rank. In order to prevent ourselves from focusing on outliers, we’ll use a box-and-whiskers plot; the middle line of the box is the median and the outside edges of the box are the 25th and 75th percentile values. The “whiskers” of the plot will give us the complete range of typical outcomes, with some dots representing extreme values outside of the typical range.

Below covers the top 100 players in the draft.

What if you wanted to know where positions might be scarce or abundant in the draft? We also have a positional distribution chart.

In 2016, then-Washington State head coach Mike Leach simplified his approach to quarterback development for media members following a practice. As the co-founder of the Air Raid offense believed, accuracy was the most important trait a quarterback could possess.

“All of high school, he’s not accurate, now all of a sudden, you’re special, you’re going to make him accurate. After all of college, he isn’t accurate; you’re going to make him accurate. I haven’t seen that happen,” Leach said. “I’ve seen guys improve, but they just don’t become accurate. … You can go get the shortstop and teach him to play quarterback easier than you can make someone accurate.”

While Leach does have a point, he is partially responsible for some of the biggest reasons why quarterback evaluation in the NFL Draft process is a mixed bag.

In college football, the wild diversity of schemes makes it difficult to pinpoint what quarterbacks can actually do in pro-style offenses. While most NFL offenses will operate under center, college offenses are the byproduct of what a quarterback likes to do. As a result, offenses that run Air Raid concepts, like Leach, will have no issue spamming their core concepts, like Y-Cross, until the game is over.

While evaluating a quarterback based only on those concepts isn’t the best way to find your favorite team’s next franchise quarterback, there is often additional insight available from which routes or concepts quarterbacks pick as their favorite or believe they struggle with.

Take Y-Cross, for example. The concept prides itself on quick progressions, but the combination of a deep over and post on the playside means there are NFL throws against certain coverages. If a quarterback likes throwing the concept and can showcase a mastery of working through it with accuracy, there will be translatable traits throughout the play.

During the pre-draft cycle, Wide Left spoke to multiple top quarterbacks to find out which routes they enjoyed throwing and which concepts they believed they needed to work on heading into the NFL.

Texas Tech QB Behren Morton

Between his time at Eastland (TX) High School and Texas Tech, Behren Morton has spent more time in the Air Raid than any quarterback in this year’s draft.

Even with four offensive coordinators at Texas Tech, Morton hasn’t deviated from Air Raid concepts, with the Red Raiders running their entire offense out of shotgun under head coach Joey McGuire. Unsurprisingly, Morton’s favorite route concept to throw is a staple in any offense that runs concepts from the pass-heavy scheme.

“Y-Cross kind of beats everything. You can beat man; it can beat cover 2, cover 3, and cover 4. You can beat all-out blitz,” Morton said. “When I hear Y-Cross in the playbook, I’m fired up.”

While Pro Football Focus does not have Y-Cross as an available passing concept, it does credit Morton as 14-of-20 for 305 yards and two touchdowns on crossing routes in 2025.

Since Morton had full control of what’s called at the line of scrimmage, he doesn’t believe there was a route concept that gave him trouble. However, at the East-West Shrine Bowl, Morton had to adjust to playing at a slower pace than he was used to in college.

“I’ve never huddled in my career. In high school, I ran the Air Raid. I’ve had four different coordinators at Texas Tech; we were all in Air Raid, taking victory formation [as] shotgun snaps, never under center,” Morton told Wide Left during Shrine Bowl. “This week has been awesome as far as getting to go under center and getting to know we don’t have to play at a two-minute pace, we can slow things down, and we can really operate.”

Texas Tech LB Jacob Rodriguez (former Virginia quarterback)

Before he switched to defense, Rodriguez was a standout quarterback at Rider High School in Wichita Falls, TX, impressing even his future college teammates with his ability to throw the ball.

“He really threw the deep ball well. He was really powerful, obviously, as you know, but he could really spin it. He was a dual-threat kind of guy,” said Morton. “My roommate at Texas Tech was his tight end, so I went to watch him in the fourth round when they were playing in the playoffs. I was like, ‘This dude is legit.’ He can spin it, and he can get the ball out quick, but he can also put his face to your chest and run you over.”

One of the wonderful elements of aggregating over 100 big boards is the ability to figure out which players are drawing the biggest disagreements across all of the analysts, not something that is as easy to figure out with 10-12 player rankings. The backlog — over a decade — of data allows us to also perform some contextual calculations that can smooth out our process and give us more granular results.

Because we have this treasure trove of data, I’ve been able to modify the approach to our “polarizing players” calculation that makes the tuning process a bit more accurate.

Often, players who provoke the most discussion can seem like the most polarizing prospect in the draft, but are not. This year, for example, the most polemic discussions seem to surround Ruben Bain Jr., Makai Lemon and Blake Miller. But analysts generally don’t disagree all that much about where those players should slot on their boards.

As an example, an early version of the Consensus Big Board in 2014 found that Jadeveon Clowney, who was subject to constant questions about his work ethic and production, was near-universally considered the top prospect in the draft. He was divisive in discourse, but analysts ultimately did not care about narrative fodder – he was one of the least polarizing players in the draft.

This has been the case for a number of top prospects over the years, though not quite as emphatically so as with the Clowney example. Divisive conversations surrounding Ed Oliver, Jamal Adams, Jerry Jeudy, Will Fuller and DJ Moore didn’t materialize into a real divergence in rankings.

On the other hand, some players drew dramatic disagreements between analysts without much hot-take style press on how they’d fail or succeed. These include players like Jonathan Allen, Keanu Neal, John Ross, Austin Jackson, Jamin Davis and Charles Harris.

Last year, we had an unusually polarizing top-32, with Cam Ward, Tyler Warren, Will Johnson, Tetairoa McMillan, Jalon Walker, Malakai Starks, Mykel Williams, Shedeur Sanders and Nick Emmanwori appearing as polarizing members of the class — in a typical class, we see four players from the top 32 hit the most polarizing players list, not nine.

Many of those players were the ones we saw leading discussions about their true talent level, meaning the discourse matched the reality of analyst rankings. But players like Will Campbell — despite endless conversation about their NFL role and fit — didn’t actually draw too much analyst disagreement. So too with Travis Hunter, who was a near universally ranked number one player despite conversation about his best NFL position.

Does It Matter if a Player is Polarizing?

Two years ago, we evaluated whether more polarizing players were set up to succeed or fail more often than their less-polarizing peers with similar consensus ranks.

We’re reworking that list with our new historically-adjusted formula and adding players form the 2022 and 2023 NFL drafts to get a better sense of what it means when a player is more polarizing than their peers.

The first step, of course, is to figure out the variance in rankings across analysts. But there’s a bit of an issue. Players ranked in the 80s or 120s are more similar in value than players ranked in the top five or top 30.

Small differences in evaluation will result in larger differences in rank for players further down the board.

Analysts know that they are disagreeing sharply with one another when they say a player is not worthy of a top-five pick and instead worth a top-ten pick — but not when they say that a Day 3 player should be just barely in or out of the Top 100.

So, we introduce a modifier to the initially calculated variance that, over multiple drafts, functionally reduces the correlation of “rank” and raw variance to zero.

The output number is basically meaningless, so I wanted to transform it into something pretty recognizable. As always, I’ve been inspired by the analysts at Pro-Football-Reference, who themselves took inspiration from baseball.

In their era-adjusted “index” scores for variance statistics, they reproduce the method that we get for OPS+ and other “plus”-type stats from baseball. Essentially, 100 is average, while every 15 “points” is one standard deviation.

Those unfortunately familiar with IQ scores might recognize this system – it’s essentially the same.

The Most Polarizing Players of Past Drafts

With all of that context in mind, we can check out the most polarizing players from the 2016 to 2023 drafts.

There are a few observations we can make from this list. The first is that reaches seem much more likely with extremely polarizing players, as one might expect. It also seems that, with these polarizing players, the NFL does a better job of assessing overall talent than the consensus board.

For players where disagreement was substantial (Josh Allen, Carson Wentz, A’Shawn Robinson, Dalvin Cook, Daniel Jones, Anthony Richardson and Sam Darnold), teams generally reached on the player, though it should be noted that the vast majority of these players were quarterbacks, which teams are generally justified reaching on versus the consensus board.

In terms of eventual contract value and contribution to winning, even a “bust” at quarterback in the first round exceeds some hits at other positions, suggesting that drafting a below-average quarterback is a better move than drafting a Pro Bowler at most other positions.

Regardless of how one interprets that dynamic, one can broadly see that this approach of reaching for uniquely polarizing players has sometimes worked out for NFL teams. Though the Eagles likely wished that the Carson Wentz era didn’t end the way it did, they also probably are comfortable enough with having made that investment.

Josh Allen has been an astounding investment, and Dalvin Cook turned out remarkably well for the Vikings, given the nature of his fall down the draft board.

For the most part, however, this group of 25 players — the most polarizing in the history of the Consensus Big Board — has not met expectations in either draft capital or pre-draft ranking. For every Josh Allen, there are a few Sidney Joneses.

What we can tell from these extremes, however, is that when polarizing players hit, they hit with authority. Jeffery Simmons, Josh Allen, Josh Reynolds, Jordan Love, Parry Nickerson, and Dalvin Cook have all returned significant value above their pick slot to their respective franchises.

But most of these players busted, whether they were reaches or steals.

To see if this was a small-sample issue, I looked at all the players considered significantly polarizing in the top 150 of the Consensus Big Board. This includes hits like Maxx Crosby, Dak Prescott, DK Metcalf, Fred Warner, Blake Cashman, Kayshon Boutte and Parker Washington, along with busts like Derek Barnett, Payton Turner, Andre Dillard, Malik McDowell, Marcus Davenport, Johnathan Abram and Austin Jackson.

There are a lot of consensus big boards out there purporting to give us information on the NFL draft. Which one should you keep track of?

Wide Left will be publishing its Consensus Big Board soon, aggregating data from over 100 analysts. That piece, like this one, will be free to all readers.

Back in 2015, when I started the Consensus Big Board project, there weren’t many resources that gathered together the accumulated wisdom from draft watchers. Over ten years later, that’s changed.

There are about a dozen places to find a consensus board, including multiple former employers of mine, as well as more open fora like Reddit or social media platforms. On top of that, we have access to other methods for aggregating opinions on player prospects in the draft, including the aggregated mock positions from GrindingTheMocks and the NFL Mock Draft Database.

Is there any serious difference between them?

To some extent, we explored this two years ago when discussing the different consensus boards.

Why come to Wide Left when all of these other options are available?

I wanted to answer that question with some rigor, so I contacted Benjamin Robinson, who runs Grinding the Mocks, and we worked together to test the boards. What I found might not be surprising. But first, a primer on how these boards are constructed.

Why Are These Rankings Different?

There are essentially four categories of player rankings I’ll be looking at: the limited-rank-average model employed by most consensus boards across the web, the mock draft aggregation produced by Robinson, the expanded-value-average model for Wide Left’s board, and the blended board/mock model employed by the NFL Mock Draft Database.

Most consensus boards take rankings from 10 to 16 or so analysts and average the ranks. So, Fernando Mendoza might be ranked {1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8} by 15 boards, his average rank would be 3.27. Arvell Reese might be ranked {1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4 and 5} for an average rank of 2.53, so he would be ahead of Mendoza. In this exercise, Jeremiyah Love ranks {1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5 and 6} with an average of 2.80.

So, an averaging approach would have those players rank Reese first, Love second and Mendoza third. Easy to understand, intuitive, and gets the broad picture across easily.

That might tell us who experts think are the best players in the draft, but it doesn’t tell us very much about where those players might go.

Grinding the Mocks focuses primarily on mock draft data (with a small amount of big board data) to construct a regression model that is tuned to better reflect expected player position. As the model gets more robust, it can be used to construct probability ranges for players.

This year, Robinson’s data projects Mendoza to go first (an “expected draft position” of 1.3), Reese to go (generally) second (EDP of 3.0) and Love to go fourth (EDP of 4.7).

Robinson’s model weighs more recent and more accurate mock drafts heavily, a method meant to take advantage of the most up-to-date information we’ve learned about teams or prospects, which may better tell us what might happen on draft day.

NFL Mock Draft Database’s “Consensus Board” also focuses on grabbing data from mock drafts as well as big boards, using over 1,000 mocks and nearly 150 big boards gathered throughout the year to produce a composite ranking that blends the two approaches.

There is also a decay function in the NFL MDDB, with no boards over four months old included in the calculation at any time and with recency weighting, as with Robinson’s approach.

Wide Left’s approach ignores mock drafts and assigns values to each player based on their rank from each analyst. Some consensus boards (like the Athletic’s) do the same, assigning 100 points for the top-ranked player on a board, 99 points for the second-ranked player and so on.

The value calculation Wide Left uses is modeled after various trade charts (such as the Jimmy Johnson, Rich Hill, Fitzgerald-Spielberger, and Chase Stuart charts), assigning significant value to the first overall rank and much less to the 100th-ranked player.

This way, the differences between players are better captured; assigning a player a top-ten rank suggests that the player is much more talented than the 32nd-ranked player, but assigning a player a rank of 101st is not that different from designating them as the 132nd-ranked player.

A logarithmic decline in value can capture changes in rank differences in a way that the average rank value cannot. In order to reduce the impact of outliers, Wide Left also uses the “interquartile mean” of all the values assigned by each analyst.

That means tossing out the values in the top and bottom 25 percent of the range and averaging the middle 50 percent. Then, to break ties, the outliers are reintroduced with a much lower weight.

In the above example, with Reese, Love and Mendoza — where Reese ranks first, Love second and Mendoza third by a simple average — Mendoza finds himself second, not third, because his outlier ranks of 7 and 8 are thrown out.

Not only that, the value of having that many first-overall ranks exceeds the value of the number of second-overall ranks Love receives.

Later in the draft, we find quite a few players ranked by some boards and not others. How consensus approaches deal with absent players in the rankings matters.

Different top 100s will have a different spread of players, typically encompassing a universe of 120-140 players.

A good way to understand the impact of failing to account for player absences in boards is a simple example. Let’s assume we have 100 analysts ranking players 1 to 100. We know that not every analyst will rank the same 100 players; most leave players on the cutting room floor who others have included in their top 100.

In this example, Player A is ranked by 30 boards as the 75th-best player in the draft and is unranked on the other 70 boards. Player B is ranked by all 100 boards as the 76th-best player. Most approaches to consensus boards will rank Player A as the better player, even though the average opinion on that player is that he is worse than Player B, not better.

Wide Left’s consensus board, with its points-based averaging approach and varying penalties for absences on different-sized boards, avoids that problem (at least partially). There is a bigger penalty to a player left off of a 500-player board than off of a 100-player board, and the value calculations reflect that clearly expressed preference from the analysts.

There is also a sample advantage when using 80-plus boards over 12-16 boards and it seems to play out when we look at outcomes.

OK, So Which Board is Better?

Trying to determine which board is better depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. In general, we rank players for two reasons: 1) to figure out where they’ll go in the draft or when they will no longer be available and 2) to figure out which players in the draft are most likely to succeed.

Predicting the Draft

For that first exercise, we can determine the average pick distance each board has from the NFL’s actual selections. For the averaging consensus board, I used the rankings I’ve gathered from legacy media and well-read draft analysts over the years, picking between 12 and 16 boards, depending on which ones were available. This meant grabbing the rankings from CBS Sports, The Athletic, various NFL.com boards, ESPN and so on.

Grinding the Mocks does the best job of giving us insight into where a player will fall in the draft. Using that as a guide to determine whether a team was right to trade up or to take a shot and reach instead of trading down seems like an appropriate use case.

The NFL Mock Draft Database, despite using a very similar dataset, is an entire pick or more off from the Grinding the Mock’s approach throughout the top 100, which is a bit of a surprise. Nevertheless, it significantly outperforms Wide Left’s consensus board and the typical average-rank consensus board we see on the web.

The fact that the Wide Left consensus board outperforms the typical consensus board in the first round by a good margin is an interesting insight, though that advantage disappears heading into the second round or the top 100.

Predicting Player Outcomes

But, which should we use if we want to figure out which players are best. Given how good the NFL is at rank-ordering players through the draft selection process, wouldn’t the board best at predicting how the draft will fall be the board we want to use for that exercise?

Not necessarily.

The NFL draft market isn’t very liquid; teams don’t organize optimally to make sure that player value, need, and resources all line up. A team that needs a quarterback is going to reach, and trades are pretty rare. Teams, who are risk averse, would rather stay put and make a selection than move up or down the draft until there’s significant reason to move.

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Using a combination of player grades, postseason honors, production and contract value, I’ve put together a crude ranking system to order the players from each draft class. It works alright; Dak Prescott ranks first from the 2016 draft class, followed by Jared Goff, Carson Wentz and then Jalen Ramsey – in part because quarterbacks are worth so much more than other positions.

Following that are Joe Thuney, Tyreek Hill and Hunter Henry. In 2017, the highest-ranked players are Patrick Mahomes, Deshaun Watson, George Kittle and Marlon Humphrey. In 2018, it’s Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Baker Mayfield, Mark Andrews, Quenton Nelson, Dallas Goedert and Jaire Alexander.

These rankings are by no means perfect, but they’re close enough to perform an analysis on how rank-ordering worked for boards and the NFL. Because we don’t have as much information on the performance of players from the 2024 and 2025 draft classes, they’ve been excluded.

Draft values and contract values both tend to organize themselves with exponentially increasing or decreasing values, so after broadly rank-ordering the players from the drafts, we can assign draft value to them.

That way, we can compare the implied value from the big boards against the produced value of the players who were selected and treat them like the logarithmic trade values used in the Wide Left consensus board rankings.

From there, we can see how close each board approach was to determining a player’s long-term outcome value.

In terms of projecting player outcomes, it doesn’t look particularly close; the Wide Left Consensus Big Board vastly outperforms the mock draft database and the average ranking approach in the first round, second round and beyond. The Grinding the Mocks database, perhaps by virtue of getting closer to NFL draft selections, comes in second in each of those value buckets.

The expansive nature of the Wide Left Consensus Board really shines on Day 3, where having data on over 800 players organized by perceived talent allows for more granular grading on players who end up going on Day 3.

Which aggregate board should you choose? It depends on what you’re looking for.