By the time the NFL Draft rolls around, you’ve had countless mock drafts by so-called experts shoved down your throat that are designed to give insight as to what NFL front offices are thinking.

Trouble is, they’re almost always wrong.

The consensus number one pick in 2014 was thought to be Jadeveon Clowney or Johnny Manziel. When the Texans chose to take the Clowney route, many assumed Manziel wouldn’t last long.

That was until the free-fall started.

Many were shocked–as in lost their sh*t–when UCF’s Blake Bortles was selected third overall by the Jaguars, causing Manziel to show one of many of his “draft reactions” throughout his fall until the Browns traded up to select him at 22.

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Of course the pundits took this an opportunity to blast Jacksonville for the pick. But let’s not be too quick to blast teams for picking guys that puts their job on the line.

Why? Because mock drafts are garbage.

Some of the biggest names in the business, Mel Kiper and Todd McShay, are paid draft analysts for ESPN. Their entire careers are built around predicting what teams will do. But they are hardly correct.

From Bleacher Report:

“The Huddle Report (subscription required) grades mock drafts and top 100 lists each year for accuracy, offering empirical data to show who is doing the best job of projecting which players will be picked by which teams and which players will be among the top 100 picks.

In the past five years, based on The Huddle Report data, Kiper has accurately predicted a team’s first-round pick 23 percent of the time; accurately predicted which players will be picked in the first round, regardless of team, 85 percent of the time; and accurately predicted which players will be picked among the top 100, regardless of team, 78 percent of the time.

By comparison, Kiper’s first-round projections ranked fifth out of the 37 mock drafts graded over the past five years, and his top 100 projections ranked 20th out of 27 top 100s graded over the past five years, according to The Huddle Report.”

People in the media are not in front of real NFL draft boards. They have no clue of what Team X is doing. They are researching as if they were drafting their own fantasy football roster and coming with their own assumptions–aka a Mock Draft.

So why do we even create Mock Drafts?

Because you guys love it. And we love talking about it. Part of the fun of the NFL is figuring out who you’ll cheering for and who else you’ll be cursing out come the next season. That’s why you see so many mock drafts.

Mock drafts aren’t going anywhere soon and neither are the draft “experts”. So don’t be mad when a team sticks to their own needs instead of falling into public pressure to draft a player for headlines.