After 362 agonizing days of nothing but mocks and projections and desperate attempts to convince us that utterly underwhelming college QBs will be surefire top-10 picks… it’s once again time for our annual three-day celebration of 32 billion-dollar businesses coming together to fill out a spreadsheet. Happy draft day, y’all.
The FTRS staff has internally conducted a mock draft every year since 2020, but unfortunately that streak came to an end this year. In lieu of a 2026 mock, though, we can offer
something else: a look back at our 2020 mock draft to see how everyone we chose has done since that day.
Our 2020 FTRS mock, conducted a few weeks into the COVID-19 quarantine period, had seven staffers split the 32 NFL teams among ourselves and then pick as if we were running the show for each of our teams. The goal here is simply to look at who everyone took and grade each pick based on how our drafted players turned out. We’ll take a look at the class as a whole, along with each drafter’s best player selection, best value pick, and worst pick.
Let’s start things off with the man who was running the site at the time:
Benjamin Tankersley
Overall: Ben whiffed on his first pick and several second-rounders, but he countered those by snagging some of the best players who came out of the 2020 class. Four of his players are top-tier NFL starters today (when healthy, in the case of Trevon Diggs), and he picked three of them ahead of where they actually went in the draft. Not a bad haul overall.
Best Player Pick: Justin Jefferson. Ben traded back a few spots from the #12 pick and still scooped up the best wideout in the draft and one of the best in the NFL today while hitting a huge need for the Raiders in that draft.
Best Value Pick: Antoine Winfield Jr. There’s an argument that Jefferson is the answer here too, but Winfield, an All-Pro safety, was a massive steal at the end of the second round.
Worst Pick: Isaiah Simmons. At the time, Simmons was a freakishly athletic tweener (between linebacker and safety) who seemed guaranteed to wreak havoc wherever he was on the field. Instead he never really found a home at either position, and he’s a non-factor at this point in his career.
Leviticus Warner
Overall: Levi’s first three picks were all duds, even though the guy he took at #2 overall was the same guy who was actually picked there. Still, he went on to find some solid players later in the draft, resulting in a decent overall class.
Best Player Pick: Brandon Aiyuk. Injuries have derailed his last couple seasons, but Aiyuk was blossoming into a star around 2024 and could be a fun player once again if he gets back to full strength.
Best Value Pick: Robert Hunt. Once he moved inside to guard after his rookie year, Hunt emerged as a top-flight interior lineman and signed a large contract with the Panthers a couple years ago. Not bad for a guy whom Levi snagged 23 spots later than he was actually taken.
Worst Pick: C.J. Henderson. Levi had the Falcons trade up eight spots to grab Henderson, who turned out to be a colossal bust. He was shipped out midway through his second season in Jacksonville and has bounced around the league (including briefly to Atlanta) without making an impact anywhere.
Jake Patterson
Overall: Jake’s draft class was heavy on SEC players but lacking in star power, as his top two picks turned into solid but unspectacular NFL players and his next two picks were colossal busts for wildly different reasons. But he did snag a few capable starters along the way.
Best Player Pick: Andrew Thomas. He struggled mightily in his first couple seasons, indicating he might be a major bust, but he grew quickly after that and has settled in as a very capable lineman for the Giants.
Best Value Pick: Jeremy Chinn. He’s been a capable NFL starter for pretty much his entire career, and Jake snagged him 14 spots before he was actually taken in the draft.
Worst Pick: Isaiah Wilson, at least in football terms. We’ll never know how Ruggs would have turned out on the field, as he threw away his career midway through his second season and is serving a lengthy prison sentence. We did get to see how Wilson turned out: he played exactly one NFL game before the Titans decided he was a lost cause. Go Dwags.
Ethan Kreager
Overall: Ethan’s draft was very hit or miss, with some excellent players mixed in with some major busts, but it all boiled down to a solid class overall. Some of his best picks were guys he took well ahead of where NFL teams actually picked them, so he showed a pretty good eye for talent.
Best Player Pick: Xavier McKinney. He was okay with the Giants but emerged as a superstar after going to the Packers. The talent was always there, so the real surprise is that he slid to the second round in the actual draft.
Best Value Pick: Cesar Ruiz. He’s been a consistent starter on the interior line (though mostly at guard) for the Saints, and he was a late first-rounder in reality, so getting him early in the second made the pick even more solid.
Worst Pick: Jeff Okudah. Yeah, he’s the guy Detroit took in that same spot in the real draft. Yeah, he was still a complete bust who never came close to being a shutdown corner despite getting opportunities with a few teams.
Jeff Cramer
Overall: Jeff didn’t have too many misses (aside from one really bad one) and hit on a lot of his picks, ultimately putting together one of the stronger overall classes in the group.
Best Player Pick: CeeDee Lamb. Hard to find too many faults with a guy who’s been a highly productive receiver for the last six years. It’s even funnier because Lamb was on the board in 2020 when Denver was picking at #15 and was targeting a wideout, and… the Broncos took Jerry Jeudy over him.
Best Value Pick: Jonathan Taylor. He was by far the best running back in this class, so kudos to Jeff for seeing that and grabbing him in the second round. (Compounding the Denver failures: their actual pick at #46 was wide receiver K.J. Hamler, who was out of the league after three seasons.)
Worst Pick: Jacob Eason. It was a massive reach for a guy who in reality was taken in the fourth round. Eason threw 10 career passes in the NFL, two of which were picked off. Go Dwags.
Nishant Prasadh
Overall: Nishant scooped up some very solid players in the first round but had a disastrous second round, getting pretty much nobody of value with his last five picks. Still, he had one unique distinction: he was the only drafter to correctly predict three real-life draft picks, as he selected Tua Tagovailoa, Justin Herbert, and Ross Blacklock with their actual teams at the spots where they were taken in the 2020 draft.
Best Player Pick: Justin Herbert. He’s gotten grief for struggling to lead the Chargers deeper into the playoffs, but Herbert has been a solid-to-great starting QB for six years and has proven himself to be well worth the top-10 selection—especially compared to the up-and-down career of the QB taken one spot before him.
Best Value Pick: Zack Baun. He wasn’t taken until much later in the actual 2020 draft, and it took him a few years and a change of scenery to find his footing, but Baun blossomed into an All-Pro linebacker after joining the Eagles in 2024.
Worst Pick: Ross Blacklock. He felt like great value at the #40 pick during the mock draft, but he barely even played in 40 games in his career and was a non-factor after his first two years in the league.
Kieffer Milligan
Overall: While everyone’s draft classes had a few good picks, none compared to the sheer depth of Kieffer’s draft class. All nine of his picks have been capable multi-year starters at some point in their careers, and all but two of them are still somewhere between solid starters and full-on stars today.
Best Player Pick: Jalen Hurts. He and Joe Burrow have both been top-tier starting QBs for several years, and Burrow is probably the better player when healthy, but Hurts gets the nod simply for having stayed on the field more consistently.
Best Value Pick: A.J. Terrell. He slid to the end of the first round in our mock after struggling badly to cover JaMarr Chase and Justin Jefferson in the LSU-Clemson title game, although in reality Atlanta correctly saw that game as a blip and took him at #16. He was excellent value at his actual draft slot and even better value where Kieffer snagged him.
Worst Pick: Jedrick Wills. He was a solid left tackle early in his career, but injuries and a lack of development led to an early end to his tenure in Cleveland. Wills sat out 2025 and signed with Chicago, but it’s unclear if he’ll amount to anything more than a reserve lineman from here on.
