NFL Draft consensus boards: How they inform team strategy, and why they matter

The wisdom of crowds can be a useful concept when deciding which course to take at any given time, especially in higher-stress moments, when the effects of decisions can be specifically job-defining or job-eliminating based on the results. Such packaged wisdom can also serve as a useful balm when one is trying to save one’s job or reputation. If you’re close to the consensus every time, and things still don’t work out? Well, hey — at least you weren’t an outlier.

A primary disadvantage to such aggregate thinking is that you risk being swept away by that same crowd. If you’re never an outlier — if you never dare to take a risk — why are you there in the first place? Why can’t you be replaced by a bot?

Such things have been on the minds of most, if not all, NFL shot-callers before, during, and after the NFL draft. And when it comes to the draft, the consensus board has become the Big Thing. Distilled perhaps most expertly by Arif Hasan on his Wide Left SubStack, the consensus board is the aggregate of more than 100 experts who live outside NFL buildings, and have created their own big boards. The distillation of those boards give us a Top 300 best players in a consensus case, and with that, there’s your equalizer.

Now, NFL teams are on the hook to answer questions from the same media that created the consensus when they stray from the wisdom of those crowds.

When is the pivot the problem?

Jacksonville Jaguars general manager James Gladstone was certainly one guy under the gun, so to speak. The Jags’ first selection came with the 56th overall pick in the second round, as their first-round pick was given to the Cleveland Browns in the 2025 trade that allowed Gladstone to move up to the second overall pick to take Travis Hunter.

And with that 56th overall pick, the Jacksonville Jaguars selected… Texas A&M tight end Nate Boerkircher, who did not rank in Hasan’s Top 300 consensus. Texas A&M interior defensive lineman Albert Regis, selected 81st overall in the third round, ranked 150th. Oregon guard Emmanuel Pregnon, selected 88th overall in the third round, ranked 41st, but Gladstone wasn’t getting credit for that bit of bargain-shopping; people wanted to know why his overall consensus was so different than the rest.

“I listen to what’s being said about players in a very real way,” Gladstone said. “I care about it. I listen to those in this building, and the people that we invited into this building, and what their perspective is on these players.

“We build consensus internally, and that is leveraged at every pick point. Our wisdom of the collective is how we phrase it, and it is what guides our decision-making. And I can tell you that when we get up on the clock, we’re looking at the draft board and we see on it our sentiment and Duval DNA, and those are the two north stars, so to speak, and that is a collective output.

”When we look at the guys that we select, we’re not selecting them without some version of consensus internally. Now, where you select a player and you talk about consensus mock drafts, it’s a very different conversation, and those don’t always align, because they don’t necessarily take into consideration the exact scheme or situation that the player is walking into. Talent is one thing, but really the intangible elements, the situation, the timing of a player’s arrival, those things are going to play a big part into what the rest of their career is going to look like and their impact on the football field or to a team in an organization.“

Gladstone has valid points. When we on the outside assemble our mock drafts and prospect rankings, we only factor in team and scheme fit to a greater or lesser degree. Such conversations are generally best left to the post-draft space, when those marriages have been certified. We on the outside are also not interviewing the players with specific eyes on their organic fits with organizational culture. We do not have the same access to medicals that NFL teams have. We are perhaps not as astute when it comes to determining when a prospect could be a better NFL player than he ever was with his college team(s) because he was misused or under-utilized.

And honestly, kudos to Gladstone for putting it on the table and making it all about an internal consensus. The only problem with that is if it becomes too insular, and you’re so high on your own supply that you fail to see the outside signs when they’re obvious.

In other words, when you keep making picks that don’t work out over time, and a lack of adherence to said consensus can be seen as part of a flawed evaluation process, that will be perceived as a problem.

Whether it actually is or not.

The San Francisco 49ers have come under such scrutiny with their recent draft history. General manager John Lynch and head coach Kyle Shanahan have each been in their current positions since 2017. Their drafts have not produced a Pro Bowler since quarterback Brock Purdy (Mr. Irrelevant as the final pick in the 2022 draft), and there have been no First-Team All-Pros since safety Talanoa Hufanga, selected with the 180th pick in the fifth round of the 2021 draft.

It’s not that the 49ers stink when it comes to the art of player evaluation — they wouldn’t be as consistently good as they have been under Lynch’s and Shanahan’s auspices were that the case. It’s more about why they see their method as specifically superior to the idea of fanning out from an aggregate, making your outlier decisions from there, and whether that methodology produces the desired results.

“Well, I appreciate that you think that; depends on whose consensus,” Lynch said on April 25, when asked about the reaches the 49ers have made over the last few years, and if they’d be better off going with a more universal approach. “We’ve got consensus in this building. That’s the that’s the consensus I care about.”

That consensus had the 49ers trading out of the first round entirely, and selecting Ole Miss receiver De’Zhaun Stribling with the 33rd overall pick at the top of the second round. Stribling was 99th on the consensus board, and while I see a great fit for him in Shanahan’s offense, could they have picked Stribling up later, and gotten themselves a better bargain by sticking to the universal board?

“That’s how he was advertised when we first looked at him, like a late second-round pick,” Shanahan said of Stribling. “Then, the more we watched him, we were like, ’Man, it’s not that we just like him because his value is better later. We actually like him more than some of these guys who will probably be taken at the end of the first round.‘

“You’ve got to decide whether you want to risk (leaving Stribling on the board) or not. We’re not going to wait and watch him go at 38 and be pissed. Let’s just take that dude at 33 and live with it.”

Indiana running back Kaelon Black, who the 49ers took with the 90th overall pick in the third round, was another interesting example. Black ranked 214th in the consensus, and he wasn’t invited to the scouting combine.

”Maybe it means he’s going in the sixth round,” Shanahan said of Black. “But then you evaluate him and you’re like, man, I think this is a third-round running back… By the time the draft came, we felt everyone’s looking at this guy as a fourth-round pick. If everyone’s looking at him as a fourth-round pick and we want him, I’ll take him at 90 in the third.

“I’ve done that so many times in 22 years. Then he goes two picks before you and you’re like, ‘Man, why’d we try to get cute?‘”

So maybe in the 49ers’ case, it’s a combination of being heavily convicted in the players you like, and the abject terror of missing out on those guys because you were too afraid to drop the hammer when it was ultimately necessary. As long as the method is aligned in reality, as opposed to a fear-based tack, things should ultimately work out in the affirmative.

What happens when you are the consensus?

Generally speaking, the Baltimore Ravens have no issues with being on the wrong side of any aggregation. They’ve been seen as one of the NFL’s most draft-stable franchises for so long, that even when they stray, they’re given the benefit of the doubt.

Still, general manager Eric DeCosta, who replaced the legendary Ozzie Newsome in 2019, is well-aware of the consensus phenomenon.

”The consensus board didn’t exist years ago, right? It’s a newer thing,” DeCosta said in late April. “And I think over the last three years or so, more teams seem to be drafting the same as the Ravens. There seems to be an alignment in some ways of boards. And some of that might be based on modeling and analytics and more data being used, some of that data, which is industry data and various things. I’m not sure if that’s good or not.”

DeCosta also hypothesized that other teams’ boards are more aligned with the Ravens’ internal consensus, which is an interesting way of pointing out why and when it can be difficult to find bargains in the draft. It’s the old Moneyball conundrum — What happens when you were out on the ledge for a long time to your own distinct advantage, and now, everybody else is trying to play your game?

“That’s problematic, I think,” DeCosta said. “Because we do use percentages, and we do the probabilities that players are going to be there, and I think it gets kind of wonky when we really like a guy that the consensus boards maybe don’t like as much, and then the probabilities might be reflective of the consensus boards. But then, the players get picked closer to where we had them ranked, and we’re angry or disappointed because then we thought, ‘Man, we should have just taken the players where we had them, and not where the probabilities or the consensus boards thought.’”

If you experience that enough, you tend to fall into the 49ers’ thought process, where you will aggressively draft guys where you think you have to, as opposed to where you’d ideally want to.

Unsurprisingly, the Ravens weren’t wildly off of the consensus with any of their first four picks:

The first real reach was the selection of SMU tight end Matthew Hibner with the 133rd overall pick in the fourth round; Hibner was 241st in the consensus. But with their very next pick — 162nd overall inn the fifth round — Baltimore got Duke cornerback Chandler Rivers, who ranked 86th on the consensus board.

So, there are different ways to do things. Perhaps the most interesting Ravens departure from the process was Clemson running back Adam Randall, selected with the 174th overall pick in the fifth round; the board had him at 204. The Randall pick was different because it was specifically made at the behest of team owner Steve Bisciotti.

“Steve was begging for a draft pick, and he owns the team,” DeCosta said after Day 3. “I said, ‘Yes, Steve. Of course you can have a draft pick.’ And so we decided on our last fifth-round pick. He did his research. He studied the tape and talked to people. He has a really good relationship with the Clemson head coach [Dabo Swinney], and Adam’s a guy as a former wideout — he has a varied skillset. He does a lot of different things well. We think the best is yet to come with him as a running back. He has really good hands. He can run routes. He’s a possible kick returner – a special teams guy. He has a great body and good measurables, and we’re excited to see what he can do. He’s kind of a ‘jackknife.’ He’s a phenomenal kid. We think [he has] one of the best makeups in this draft.”

Even when the Ravens throw a bone to the owner, they still don’t stray too far from the consensus.

The future is in… supermodels?

No, not those supermodels.

Each team has its own way of getting to where they want to be for the draft. And while every general manager and head coach will talk about analytics in a general sense when pressed, the actual approaches vary wildly from completely old-school teams that go strictly on player evaluation and intangibles to newer-school franchises that deal with statistical modeling in some very interesting ways.

The Carolina Panthers, who believed the ideal first two rounds of the 2026 draft would have them taking Georgia offensive tackle Monroe Freeling and Texas Tech interior defensive lineman Lee Hunter, ask Vice President of Football Analytics Eric Eager (a Pro Football Focus alum) to take statistical and physical data for every draft prospect and put it all into his own predictive model. That model will literally run a million mock drafts to give outcome probabilities that ideally merge with traditional scouting and detective work.

Based on their data, the Panthers were right in their assessment that Freeling would last until the 19th overall pick. But on the second day, the model said that there would be a run on IDL at the top of the second round because the pickings were getting slim, and it might behoove the team to trade up. They moved from 51 to 49 in a trade with the Minnesota Vikings, and took Hunter with that pick. Would they have been able to get Hunter had they stayed put? One never knows, but the next IDL taken was Missouri’s Chris McClellan by the Green Bay Packers with the 77th overall pick in the third round.

One reason that the Panthers’ model works for them is that the “real football guys” are actually in league with the “geeks.” The common perception that there’s a Great Wall of China between the two factions couldn’t be further from the truth. The real football guys are asking smart questions that have the geeks making their models better and more useful.

Because when you’re trading around on the third day, and you have a model that tells you the approximate probability that your favorite small-school prospect will be there where you sit in the fifth round, and how you can increase those probabilities if you trade up (and precisely to where), you’re doing less guessing. You’re acting less frequently on the panic that the guy you want won’t be there. You’re creating your own consensus board based on statistical modeling as opposed to clanking around in the dark.

“Dan’s a really good leader,” Eager recently said of Panthers general manager Dan Morgan. “One of the traits of a great leader is that you’re excellent at your own job, and I think every single scout in our building looks up to him as an evaluator. That’s the No. 1 thing, but he knows the right questions to ask of me because he is incredibly curious about not only football, but the process of evaluating football players. And so he just asked really good questions.

”And then as an analyst, it’s really fun, and frankly easier to do your job when the stakeholders ask good questions. So he’s an excellent evaluator, and everybody feeds off of that. And then he asks incredible questions, which then force me to create solutions, which create better questions, which create better solutions.

“I think that core curiosity that he has is the fuel for everything, right? Better subject matter experts always make for better collaboration, for sure.”

That’s true in any endeavor, and smart NFL teams are learning that a firm embrace of all the tools available can take you to a place where the internal consensus leads the way. At that point, the external consensus becomes more noise and less signal, because the internal work is paying off.