The grading and boards for Monti Ossenfort and the Cardinals were finished last week. This week, the effort -- besides not overthinking how they built their board -- goes into a handful of mock simulations internally to try and prepare for whatever may be sitting there at 16 overall.
How they guesstimate such things (and they do enough permutations that many are analyzed) comes in part through information gleaned by talking to other people around the league, perhaps some media, and then looking at at least some of the mock drafts that are floating out there.
NFL draft analyst Daniel Jeremiah, who once worked in team front offices, said GMs just want to have a sense of what range each player might go, understanding they can't know specifics.
"They're not going to adjust how they rank their own players, but what happens is everybody has a different board," Jeremiah said. "So if you are picking 25, they want to know what the rest of the league thinks of their guys. If you are kind of going through everybody and their eighth player is not loved around the league and everybody thinks he's a second-round player or what have you, then they're more patient to wait and see if they could get their eighth-ranked player at pick No. 25. Once they start realizing, man, the rest of the league has very similar feel on our players, we don't want to get wiped out.
"I've been on teams where we've picked at, like, say we've picked 22, and we've taken our ninth best player at 22. I've been on teams where we've picked in that same range, say the same number, 22, and we've got our 21st player. We just got wiped out. Like, wiped out completely."
Such information informs GMs what they might want to do in the trade market. What player(s) might a team be more aggressive for which to trade up? Or will a player coveted make it to your pick?
"They're not adjusting their ranking," Jeremiah said. "They're just trying to figure out if there's a chance they could get one of their premier, premier players and move up."
I'm guessing Ossenfort would never consider it for a millisecond, but it would be fascinating to see what some of the mocks the Cardinals draft room contingent comes up with prior to the Titans being on the clock.
