With the NFL Draft complete, the 2021 fantasy season is upon us – your dynasty rookie draft might be happening this week! One part of the festivities is the grand tradition of publishing mock NFL drafts – trying to predict what each team will (or should) do on draft day. We’re suckers for a good accuracy competition here at FantasyPros, so we collected 182 mock drafts in order to see whose was best.
If we simply counted how many totally correct picks a mock draft had, that would result in a lot of ties. It would also ignore some of the thigs that can be good about a prediction that isn’t 100% correct – like correctly identifying which position a team will draft in the first round, even if they take a different player at that position. In an effort to score mock drafts in a way that (a) has enough differentiation for a leaderboard, and (b) appreciates some of those partially-correct picks, we’ve broken down mock draft scoring into four categories:
- Where each player is drafted (4 points per pick)
- The order players within each position group are drafted (3 points)
- What positions each team would draft in the first round (2 points)
- Which team each player would land on (1 point)
For this competition we only score the first round of the draft, but the results later on can impact some of the above categories. For example, if you predicted the Jaguars would take CB Tyson Campbell with the 25th pick in the 1st round (where they actually took RB Travis Etienne), you would still get a point in the 4th category because the Jags ended up drafting Campbell in the second round.
Now it’s time to recognize the experts with the most accurate 2021 mock NFL drafts. You can also check out the full leaderboard of 182 mocks, including sub-category scores.
| Top 10 Mocks – Overall Accuracy | ||
| Rank | Analyst | Points |
| 1 | Josh Norris – Underdog Fantasy | 206 |
| 2 | Charlie Campbell – Walter Football | 204 |
| 3 | Francisco (Chato) Romero – Estadio Fantasy | 200 |
| 4 | Walter Cherepinsky – Walter Football | 194 |
| 5 | Sean Koerner – The Action Network | 190 |
| 6 | Benjamin Solak – The Draft Network | 189 |
| 7 | Dane Brugler – The Athletic | 188 |
| 8 | Ben Wasley – The Fantasy First Down | 187 |
| 9 | Trevor Sikkema – The Draft Network | 186 |
| 10 | Steve VanDusen – Mock Draft Database | 184 |
View entire Accuracy Leaderboard (182 mocks graded)
Josh Norris from Underdog Fantasy had a truly excellent mock draft. His 206 total points is the highest we’ve seen in four years of this competition (Charlie Campbell‘s 204 also beats the previous record of 203). He also correctly predicted 16 landing spots, crushing the previous record of 13 (Steve VanDusen also beat that record with 14 this year). By both these metrics, this year’s draft was not easier to predict than last year’s – the median overall score of 153 was slightly lower than last year’s 156, and mocks in the top ten tended to have about 11 correct landing spots in both years. Charlie Campbell from Walter Football, who won this competition outright in 2019, came in second place. In addition to being the only other expert to beat the previous overall points record, he earned the distinction of being the only expert in the Top 5 of all four sub-categories.
You can check out the full scoring breakdown for all 182 mocks, and the results for past years, in our Mock Draft Accuracy Leaderboard.