NFL Draft game: the shadow draft

Introducing the Shadow Draft: an NFL draft game that is fun and will help everyone understand just how difficult a general manager’s job can be during the draft.

If you’re watching the NFL draft this at home, I highly recommend “playing along” with your favorite team and conducting a shadow draft. It is an interesting experience, and it will help you understand just how difficult a GM’s job can be.

If you’ve never heard of a shadow draft before, you aren’t alone. It is an idea that hasn’t caught on much in NFL circles. For some strange reason, it is more of a baseball thing. This is odd since the idea fits the NFL far better than MLB.

What is a shadow draft you ask? Well, here’s now it works. Whenever your team makes a pick, you pick a player. You have to make the pick before your team’s pick is announced so as to make sure you’re not biased by what the team did. As the draft unfolds, assume the team picked only your guys, so the totality of the draft class is independent on what players your team actually picked.

Also, if the team makes a trade, you have to pick where they pick. So if the Seahawks trade down from No. 26, you don’t get to pick a player there. You have to pick a player only where your team does.

Need an example? Check out my shadow drafts from 2012, 2013 and 2015. (Please ignore the formatting weirdness of the old ones, they were written for an older version of our software.) If you’re looking for my 2014 shadow draft, it wasn’t published. That draft happened during my sabbatical away from 12thMR. I still did one though, but no one got to see it besides me and my cat.

Looking back, my 2012 draft was pretty gross. I’m not sure it would be possible to miss as badly as I did on a certain 3rd round pick out of Wisconsin. Melvin Ingram and Lavante David would have been good picks, but the rest of that draft was fairly awful on my part.

2013 was decent at the top, but horrible at the bottom. I loved Keenan Allen coming out of college, and he’s been as good as I expected. Akeem Spence would have been great in Seattle’s scheme as well. The rest was pretty much a disaster though.

Next: Was Richard Sherman the best John Schneider draft pick?

My 2015 draft though was solid. A year later, I think I like my draft over Schneider’s, which is proof that I might be insane. If it wasn’t for me getting the Tyler Lockett-Jaelen Strong pick wrong, my draft would have been a major home run. Two O-line starters, a Mebane replacement, Nick Marshall. That was easily my best draft ever.

So, get your paper out and your favorite draft board. Shadow Draft Season begins on Thursday!