DN Live Community Mock Draft: Recap

First off, I want to thank all of the Daily Norseman members who participated in the Live Mock Draft last night.  It was a ton of fun, and this kind of event continues to prove how great of a community we have here in our little corner of the web.  You can read through all of the comments of the story stream to get a good idea of how things went, but I thought I would provide a bit of a recap for those of you that didn't want to wade through hundreds of comments.

The draft started shortly after 7:30pm CST with all 32 team owners accounted for, and the 1^st round was full of trade proposals and wheeling and dealing.  Things got off to a pretty dramatic start as the Buffalo Bills pulled off an epic trade with the Houston Texans to move up from #9 overall to #1 overall.  In addition to swapping 1^st round picks, the Bills also gave up a 2015 1^st rounder and 3^rd rounder, and 2016 3^rd rounder and their 3^rd and 4^th round pick in the 2014 draft.  The Texans pulled off quite the haul, while the Bills promptly selected Jadeveon Clowney #1 overall.  There were many other trades in the 1^st round, which delayed things a bit as I had to verify if the trades were possible and sufficiently balanced.  The first round took nearly an hour and a half to complete as a result, but pulling off trades of this nature is half the fun in a mock draft!  The first 7 picks had some major surprises.  First off, only one quarterback came off the board: Johnny Manziel to the Rams 2^nd overall.  Secondly, no offensive tackles were taken until the Dolphins moved up to #11 to take Greg Robinson.  And lastly, there were three wide receivers and two linebackers taken in the top 7 selections: Sammy Watkins, Mike Evans, Odell Beckham, Khalil Mack and Anthony Barr.  In my opinion this seems unlikely to happen tomorrow night, but stranger things have happened in the real NFL draft.

In any case, when the Vikings were on the clock at #8 we had a lot of options.  MarkSP18 who was controlling the St. Louis Rams were interesting in trading up from #13 with their other 1^st round pick, but those of us present to discuss the pick couldn't reach a consensus soon enough on whether we should do it, and Mark pulled the offer from the table.  Bridgewater, Bortles and Carr were amazingly all still on the board, as were C.J. Mosley, Darqueze Dennard and Ha-Ha Clinton-Dix.  After the trade was pulled, it basically came down to a choice between Teddy Bridgewater or Blake Bortles, and more people wanted Teddy Bridgewater, so he was our 1^st round selection.   With Clowney, Manziel, Mack, Barr and Watkins all gone by pick #8, it made the choice of Bridgewater pretty easy.

The 2^nd round went a little more smoothly as there were less trades for me to deal with, but it still took over an hour to complete.  The Vikings didn't have a lot of options in the 2^nd as most of the top flight cornerbacks and safeties had already been taken.  Kyle Van Noy was the clear favorite and an easy choice for us to make, although we did consider a few other options before taking Van Noy.  By the time the 2^nd round finished it was nearly 10pm CST and we debated about going forward with the 3^rd round or not. But, enough people wanted to continue so I agreed to see it through to the bitter end, with one exception: no more trades.  We whizzed through the 3^rd round in under an hour and the whole mock draft took about 3 and a half hours to complete...going just a little bit longer than I anticipated.

As we got deeper into the pool of draft picks, things began to get a little bit murky.  We had such good consensus on our 1^st and 2^nd round picks that it made the 3^rd round seem much more difficult.  There were a lot of suggestions for pick #72 but it came down to a choice between OG Cyril Richardson and CB Bashaud Breeland.  In the end, Richardson appeared to garner just a few more votes and ultimately I let Arif's Consensus Big Board ranking cast the deciding vote as Richardson was ranked nearly 40 spots higher than Breeland.  It was a similar situation with our other 3^rd round selection #96 overall.  Things were even murkier there and it came down to a choice between three different prospects: LB Yawin Smallwood, RB Terrance West and CB Jaylen Watkins.  In the end, Jaylen Watkins scored a few more votes than Yawin Smallwood and he became our second 3^rd round selection.  So, our first four draft picks once again were as follows:

#8: QB Teddy Bridgewater, Louisville
#40: LB Kyle Van Noy, BYU
#76: OG Cyril Richardson, Baylor
#96: CB Jaylen Watkins, Florida

I'd say we successfully addressed the team's four biggest needs in this draft, and managed to find some pretty good value in the process.  The following is a table of all 100 draft picks in the 2014 Daily Norseman Live Community Mock Draft.

Several people wanted to know who might have been left after we finished the 3^rd round.  So, using Arif's Consensus Big Board here were the best remaining players heading into what would have been the 4^th round:

79^th overall: RB Ka'Deem Carey, Arizona
80^th overall: DT Ego Ferguson, LSU
83^rd overall: DE Chris Smith, Arkansas
84^th overall: C Travis Swanson, Arkansas
86^th overall: RB Lache Seastrunk, Baylor
87^th overall: WR Paul Richardson, Colorado
88^th overall: WR Jared Abbrederis, Wisconsin
89^th overall: DE Jackson Jeffcoat, Texas
91^st overall: SS Dion Bailey, USC
94^th overall: WR Bruce Ellington, South Carolina
100 overall: LB Yawin Smallwood, Connecticut

Again, thank you to everyone who participated last night as it was a lot of fun.  It was a time-consuming exercise, but well worth the effort.  And it's worth repeating: for us to come together as a community and pull something like this off continues to prove that the Daily Norseman has the best damn community of any Vikings blog on the internet.