2018 NFL Draft Big Board, version 1.0: The Top 75 Players

I’ve said it many, many times: the dirty truth of “NFL Draft Season” is that amateurs focus on mock drafts, but the real draftniks focus on Big Board rankings.

Mock Drafts are just a (random & wild) prediction of what you think a team will do. You, me, or the homeless guy who told Jimmy Haslam that the Cleveland Browns should take Johnny Manziel in the 2014 NFL Draft have about the same amount of credibility and probable accuracy regarding what will happen on draft day. Projecting right now what any team is going to do in late April, after weeks of analysis, over-analysis, and then paralysis by analysis, is complete and utter horseshit.

Conversely, the Big Board is where you stake your claim in regards to saying one player is definitively better than another. So, just because I projected Sam Darnold to be picked with the top overall selection in my last mock draft doesn’t mean I think he’s the top overall player in the draft. But as you’ll see on the Big Board below, the fact that I have Saquon Barkley from Penn State means that yes, all things being equal, I think Barkley is the most talented — or “best” — player in the draft. Yet, that does NOT mean is that I think the Browns are going to take Barkley with the #1 overall pick.

So with all of that being said, and with all of this likely to change — somewhat dramatically — about two weeks from now, at the conclusion of the 2018 NFL Scouting Combine, here’s my preliminary head-to-head rankings of the top 75 players in the 2018 NFL Draft.