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1) NFL Draft weekend is one of my favorite weekends of the year. And it's not just to see who goes from Mizzou or who the Chiefs pick. It's the reactions. My favorite thing about the draft is watching these kids have their dreams come true in real time and we all get to watch it. It doesn't matter if you're the first pick or the last pick. There are tens of thousands of kids who start playing football every year and just about every one of them dreams of playing in the NFL. And every year, fewer than 260 of them get to realize that dream. Here were a couple of my favorite reactions this weekend.
I think sometimes we lose sight of how big an accomplishment getting your name called is. We spend all this time worrying about who goes where and analyzing every pick and focusing on who went too high and who didn't go high enough that we ignore what a huge thing these 257 dudes managed to accomplish this weekend. Every single one of them deserves that moment with his family and friends.
2) Of course, not being drafted doesn't mean you can't make it.
The draft is the most inexact science of them all. It's why I just laugh at criticism of recruiting rankings. NFL GMs get paid very, very well to identify talent after three to six years of getting to watch them play college football. And they still miss at least half the time. We're trying to do it three to six years earlier. It's all a guess. Caleb Williams may be a Hall of Famer and he may be terrible. There will be plenty of undrafted free agents who get cut before camp even opens, but there will be some who hang around in the league for a long time and maybe even become stars. The draft is great theater. Where it goes from here, who knows?
3) I do know it was a damn good weekend for Eli Drinkwitz. Six Missouri players were picked, which was tied for the 11th most of any school. Nothing is more important for a program than putting players in the NFL. Here are the schools who had more players taken than Mizzou:
Michigan– 13
Texas– 11
Alabama– 10
Florida State– 10
Washington– 10
Georgia– 8
Oregon– 8
Penn State– 8
Notre Dame - 7
USC - 7
Seven of those teams were the seven teams that finished above Mizzou in the final CFP rankings last year. Penn State was 13th and Notre Dame 14th. It's almost like there's a correlation between how many NFL players you have and how good your team is.The only team with more draft picks than Mizzou that hasn't won a national title is Oregon. Six of them have done so in the last 20 years. It's elite company for Mizzou. There have been drafts when Mizzou has had more players taken, though none since the draft went to just seven rounds. Since that happened, this year tied 2009 and 2015 for the most players drafted in a single year. No coincidence, those two drafts followed Missouri's best seasons since the 1960s. This one too. Now the challenge is to continue it, which Mizzou wasn't quite able to do the last couple of times it put half a dozen players in a single draft.
4) The biggest impact of the draft comes on the recruiting trail. When kids see your school's name called a lot on draft weekend, interest picks up. Drinkwitz picked up six commitments a ten-day span that ended with Jason King's pledge on Saturday. We expect there will be another handful of commitments this week, a mix of high school prospects and transfers. I ran down where things stand last night.
5) Wrapping up the draft talk, I present to you Xavier Legette and Keon Coleman.
I didn't necessarily understand all of it, but I could listen to these dudes talk for hours on end.
