If the Denver Broncos had drafted the way the experts wanted there would be no Super Bowl championships

It appears to be the rage to evaluate the draft experts and see how our front office compares to them in terms of who we would have gotten had we gotten the player that they chose for us in the first round in their final mock draft each year.

I went back to 2010 and examined the draft experts of Mel Kiper, Todd McShay and Mike Mayock. Feel free to look up others since I am curious to know what get the most “right” of any of the experts.

Note that with the exception of Von Miller, not a single pick was correct. In terms of position, they were closer. We did take a WR in round 1 in 2010 (and then a QB). We did take a defensive lineman with our first pick in the 2012 draft, I just wasn’t Michael Brockers (thank God or gods). We did take a defensive lineman in 2013, it just wasn’t one of the three that they predicted. Sylvester Williams has actually been the best of those 4 - by far - but the other three were major busts. Werner was out of the league in 2016. Carradine and Jones have combined to start 8 games in their NFL careers. We did take a CB in 2014, it just wasn’t Verrett and thankfully not Jean-Baptiste (who is not in the league anymore and never started an NFL game). They whiffed badly on 2015 and 2016. Neither expert foresaw us picking a DE/OLB in the first in the 2015 or a QB in the first in 2016. In 2015 they all predicted OL and in 2016 they had no idea what we were going to do in the first with predictions of DT, TE and S.

So how did each of these predicted crops of players turn out? I used Approximate Value which is a flawed metric but the best one we have for comparing players across different positions in the NFL. I summed the AV for all of these players to show the total value to the team that these picks would have brought to the Broncos (assuming that their careers played out as they have) and then compared that with the value that we have gotten from the guys that we actually did take in the first round.

Note that Reality was better than the best expert in terms of total AV. Kiper’s picks were the second best and McShay and Mayock appear to hate the Broncos equally given their top picks for us since 2010 have all turned out to be historic busts.