There’s not much need for a preamble. The week of the actual, honest-to-goodness NFL Draft has arrived and there’s time for just one more crack at predicting what’s going to go down on Thursday night. This is even harder than usual because there’s little consensus on all but a small handful of prospects and, most important, no quarterbacks who are even certain top-10 picks.
This is even more unusual than you may realize. If the Jaguars, Lions and Texans all pass on the position to start the draft and choose not to trade down, it will mark the first time since 2013 that there won’t be at least one quarterback among the top three picks. In fact, it would be just the third time that happened in the last 25 drafts (1998-2022); the only other occurrence was in 2000.
It’s been something you can count on since I joined in with the ranks of mock drafters some years back: The quarterbacks always rise in the end. That may not be the case this year, but I still found the placement of those passers to be what took up most of my time in putting together this final mock draft. Specifically, I spent days trying to decide whether the Carolina Panthers would or would not, as General Manager Scott Fitterer said, “take a shot” at finding a long-term answer at quarterback at pick number six. In the end…well, read on. (Or return to the top since the first thing you probably did was scroll down to pick number 27 to see who the Buccaneers got.)
This is the 10th mock draft we’ve posted on Buccaneers.com, beginning back in February. Some were straightforward first-round run-downs, but some of them had different rules or different areas of focus. You can check out the previous mocks out here:
Mock Draft 1.0 (Carmen Vitali’s final contribution.)
Mock Draft 2.0 (My first attempt, without trades.)
Mock Draft 3.0 (A mock dedicated solely to the Bucs’ 2022 draft picks.)
Mock Draft 4.0 (My second straight mock, still without trades.)
Mock Draft 5.0 (In which I am required to make at least six…