How do mock drafts forecast SEC's Elite 11?

Football fans don’t know what to do with themselves in the short hiatus between the Super Bowl and the NFL draft.

There’s a few minor reprieves — National Signing Day, college football spring games, more Deflategate (unfortunately) — but, for the most part, pigskin lovers spend the spring months doing more talking about the sport than watching anything that matters.

That won’t necessarily change on Thursday, but it is the closest thing football fans have to college football spring practice and NFL training camps.

Rather than wait for the big night to come, college and professional football fans alike call on national draft analysts to brief them on what will happen on draft night — where their favorite players will go, who their favorite NFL teams will take and what pick they can laugh off as a bust. These analysts from a variety media outlets spend the months, and really all year, leading up to the draft scouting players and teams to help give football fans a taste of what to expect in Chicago (not NYC; still takes getting used to).

They break down the draft in every way possible. They make their first-round mock drafts, crumble up their paper and do it again. It happens over and over until the final days before the draft when there are few combinations they haven’t already made. To their credit, this draft has been blown up several times with landscape-altering trades at the top of the order by the Los Angeles Rams and the Philadelphia Eagles.

So we’ve put together a breakdown of the most recent (and likely final) mock drafts by seven different analysts from four different services. Pete Prisco and Will Brinson from CBS, Bucky Brooks and Charles Davis from NFL.com, Todd McShay and Mel Kiper Jr. from ESPN and Barry Wilner from the Associated Press have chopped and screwed their lists so many times in the last few months — this is McShay 5.0, Brooks 7.0 and Prisco 11.0, for pete’s sake — that it can be hard to keep track of where everyone is projected to go.

The SEC has 11 players — Laremy Tunsil, Vernon Hargreaves III, A’Shawn Robinson, Leonard Floyd, Reggie Ragland, Jarran Reed, Laquon Treadwell, Robert Nkemdiche, Chris Jones, Ryan Kelly and Germain Ifedi — that have surfaced on these seven draft boards with a varying degree of order and consistency. Here’s a breakdown of each player and where the seven aforementioned analysts have them pegged in Thursday’s first round, with commentary to follow.

Keep in mind that Tom Brady deflated footballs because Roger Goodell said so, which means the No. 29 pick has been forfeited. Spots 29-31 in the chart indicate the picks by the Arizona Cardinals, Carolina Panthers and Denver Broncos that moved up a slot.

That certainly is a roulette-style draft board if I’ve ever seen one.

The seven analysts can’t agree on much, but one thing they have decided: Ole Miss offensive tackle Tunsil will be the first SEC player off the board. Where he’ll end up, that’s up for debate.

The most common answer is San Diego at No. 3, which would be a welcomed pick for Philip Rivers. Over the course of the draft experience, Tunsil has filled the No. 1 and No. 2 roles at times, but with the moves by the Rams and Eagles, it appears Jared Goff and Carson Wentz, a pair of quarterbacks far from SEC territory, are destined for the top spots.

That leaves Tunsil in the No. 3 spot for most, though he did fall as far as No. 7 to the San Francisco 49ers in McShay’s. Either way, the Ole Miss offensive lineman will likely find his way into the top 5 with only two of the seven analysts saying he’ll fall past Jacksonville at No. 5.

From there, it’s less certain who is considered to be the next SEC player on the board. The odds-on favorite is Hargreaves, who lands in the nine spot in four mocks. The lockdown cornerback from Florida does, however, falls all the way down to 25th in Prisco’s draft. But the Buccaneers at No. 9, having gone offense in the draft last year, appear to be the favorite to grab Hargreaves.

The linebacker shakedown will be an interesting one to watch as Thursday night unfolds. Floyd and Ragland flip back and forth for the distinction of first linebacker off the board. Floyd takes that title more often than Ragland, finding a home with the Chicago Bears at No. 11 in several mocks, though he did plummet all the way to No. 29 in McShay’s draft. For the most part, Floyd remains in the early-to-mid range of the first round with Ragland ranging anywhere from No. 14 to No. 27.

Ragland won’t be the only Alabama player taken in the first round — well, most likely. The Crimson Tide-heavy drafts of late don’t seem to have carried over to 2016. Only Tunsil, Hargreaves, Floyd, Ragland and Treadwell were unanimous selections by the analyst committee. However, fellow Alabama players A’Shawn Robinson, Jarran Reed and Ryan Kelly received mixed reviews from the panel.

Robinson is a freak of nature, but he must not be scaring NFL GMs the way he scares everyone else. Prisco, though he’s the only one, doesn’t have the big Crimson Tide defensive lineman on his mock board. Otherwise, he comes in at several spots in the middle of the first round, going as high as 16th and as low as 31st.

Reed, much like Treadwell, stayed pretty steady in all of the drafts, sticking somewhere between No. 16 and No. 21 except in Kiper’s mock where he was left off altogether. Treadwell, once believed to be the unquestioned best wide receiver in the draft, has (outrageously) been punished for a slow 40 time that he didn’t want to run in the first place. Minnesota at No. 23 looks like the consensus destination for him, though Kiper slated him all the way up to the New York Giants at No. 10, which would make a lethal SEC downfield threat with Eli Manning and Odell Beckham Jr.

Then there’s Kelly who, along with Jones and Ifedi, is less certain to get a phone call Thursday. All three have scattered expectations with late-first or second-round projections. Jones actually appears the most likely to get the first-round selection with Prisco and McShay both having him taken before the 20th pick.

That leaves us with Nkemdiche, probably the biggest mystery from any conference. Once thought to be a no-brainer, top-5 pick, Nkemdiche has fallen completely off the boards of Brinson and Kiper, but he remains on the other five. In most of those, he lands at No. 26 with Seattle or No. 31 with Denver, both terrifying selections for the rest of the NFL. For the record, Denver took Bradley Roby and Shane Ray the last two drafts — both sliding down boards because of blown-out-of-proportion disciplinary issues — and they’ve turned out to be gems, so the Broncos would probably welcome Nkemdiche with open arms with Thursday’s final pick.

Of the seven boards, only McShay had all 11 SEC potential first-round draftees in his mock. Davis, Brinson and Wilner had the least with eight each. So, likely no matter what happens, it will be another big night for SEC football at least according to these seven experts who have had months to prepare multiple selections. But remember: NFL teams only have 15 minutes, and they don’t get revisions.

With that, the Los Angeles Rams — that’s right! — you’re on the clock.