WCG Confidence Board 3.0 (Post-Combine Update)

With free agency settling down, it’s time to get serious about the draft. That’s why I have updated the Confidence Board. The new board uses twelve sources, in total. To review the scoring process, there is no weighting of any board. If the guru’s material was included, it was given full weight. I did not use mock drafts, only actual prospect rankings. When a player was listed at multiple positions, I gave him the benefit of his best ranking, and I consolidated positions as needed to provide as much consistency as possible (for example, all interior linemen are handled together, as are all safeties be they free or strong). Each player was given a score based on how close he comes to the best ranking available to him, and for ease this score is scaled to 100%.

The boards themselves are all new since the last update. Over on the side of positional rankings, I have March lists from Matt Miller, Mel Kiper (via ABC), WalterFootball, Draftek, and Mike Mayock. The Mayock lists only go down to the top five in each position, and so there’s a stiff penalty for being left off (6th and lower are all treated like 11th or worse). There’s also OurLads, which lacks a timestamp but has been updated since the 2018 NFL Combine.

Meanwhile, Big Boards include our own Jacob Infante’s February board, as well as March Top 100 Boards from CBS Sports, Luke Easterling, Sports Illustrated, and NFL Draft Geek. To balance out the narrow Mayock position rankings, I’ve added Daniel Jeremiah’s Top 50 Board in its March 7th configuration, even though it’s too short to qualify otherwise.

All told, 246 prospects were named in some capacity on one of these 12 boards. Ten players are all above 90% when it comes to their scaled score, meaning that there is remarkable confidence among the gurus in these players. The names are familiar to anyone who has been following the draft this year: Saquon Barkley, Bradley Chubb, Quenton Nelson, Minkah Fitzpatrick, Tremaine Edmunds, Denzel Ward, Roquan Smith, Vita Vea, Derwin James, and Calvin Ridley. Note that none of these are quarterbacks, and that two are safeties (which is the position that has finally been settled on for Fitzpatrick).

Edmunds is the real story of this draft in terms of climbing up boards, as at one point he was barely listed and now he is reliably in the top ten, if not top five, of all prospects. Another rapid riser (though not quite to the same heights) farther down the boards is Jessie Bates. He was not on any previous version of the boards I used. He now sits at 57th overall, and despite not being a Top 3 safety on any position board (only Mayock has him inside the top five), he is 18th overall on Draft Geek’s big board, and Daniel Jeremiah has him #30. He might be a hidden gem, but he might also be a trendy dark horse of the week.

Aggregation has not been kind to offensive tackles, as there is a guard and a pair of safeties ahead of Connor Williams, the top tackle (at #16). Here are the Top 20, with their composite scores, their “pure scores” (excluding the opinions of Mayock and Benjamin, whose shorter lists skew the scoring system), and also their position-only scores.

I will be back later with more analysis, but for anyone interested in seeing the full scores for the Top 150, they can look at this link here [Link].