In every NFL Draft, there are first-round picks and then there are players who are taken in the first round.
The first-round picks are players anyone would select. They're the players you see atop all of the draft boards. After that, you can bet that NFL teams will have 40 to 50 players who could be taken in the first round or they could be taken in the second. It largely comes down to need.
This year's draft, which will be held next week, will be no different. Except that it will be slightly different in that we know less about some of the "first-round" picks than we have in the past.
For example, Oregon's Penei Sewell is expected to be the top offensive tackle taken in this draft. He's clearly one of the top 18 players who will be taken a little over a week from now. But he also did not play football in 2020, choosing to opt out because of the pandemic.
He's not alone among the players who are considered the clear-cut first-round picks this year. A number of the top players in this draft haven't played football in more than a year. And obviously, there will be players sprinkled throughout this draft that didn't play football last year because of the pandemic.
So this year, teams know less about some of these picks than they ever have before.
That won't stop people from saying this guy or that guy was a "reach." The reality, however, is that there is no such thing as a reach in the draft. A player is where he was drafted. If he was a a first-round selection, that is where he was valued by that particular team. If he falls to the third round, that's where he belonged.
If the player works out and is a valued starter, it was a good pick. If not, he wasn't.
There are hundreds if not thousands of different player rankings available for the NFL Draft. It's a big business. We do our own rankings here on DKPittsburghSports.com. But quite frankly, none of the people putting those rankings together matter. The only ones that do are the ones put together by the 32 NFL teams.
Keep that in mind when the "grades" for the draft come out -- as they will immediately after the first round ends. The people grading those picks are doing so based on their rankings. They're not likely to admit they were wrong about their rankings.
After all, look back at any year's immediate draft rankings. A quick search of 2017 draft grades, for example, gave the Chiefs a B for trading up for Patrick Mahomes. In terms of value, they were given a C. The Steelers got a B-plus for fit and a B for value in that same grading for taking T.J. Watt 30th overall.
Mahomes and Watt are two of the best players in the NFL -- not just at their positions, the entire NFL. The 49ers, who took troubled linebacker Rueben Foster 31st got an A-plus. He is out of football.
Keep that in mind next week when you're reading those draft grades. The only grades that really matter are the on-field product. And even then, we should wait a couple of years to hand out those grades.
YOUR TURN: How much attention do you pay to post-draft grades?