What does National Signing Day and the NFL Draft have in common?

By the end of each, everyone associated with a signing class or a draft class always express their excitement following the players they added. Everyone wins, no one loses.

Of course, that’s just perception and far from reality, but that feeling is constant more often than not in both college football and the NFL. With the 2020 NFL Draft just around the corner, Pro Football Focus thought they would own up to some of the worst predictions the site has ever had in terms of the prospects they had high grades on, only to see those players fail to live up to the hype in the NFL.

Pro Football Focus lists a total of 10 prospects that flopped, including two former SEC players in Leonard Floyd and Dante Fowler.

Here’s how PFF broke down each former SEC player and where they went wrong with their grades:

Leonard Floyd

Floyd had numerous red flags coming out of Georgia before he went top-10 to the Bears in 2016. One of the biggest was simply his age. Floyd was already 23 when he was drafted and would turn 24 early on in his rookie season. That’s two and a half years older than Chase Young is coming out in this year’s draft. The fact that he was still considered a raw, undersized prospect who couldn’t get his weight any higher than 244 pounds at the Combine should have been a searing bright red flag.

Dante Fowler

We really didn’t know what to do with the numbers at the end of the season in our very first year of grading college prospects. With nothing to compare the grades to, we didn’t put many definitive draft takes out there besides one mock draft the day of the NFL Draft. Fowler was one of the highest-graded edges in the country, so he ended up a top-five pick for us. In retrospect, his 81.9 pass-rushing grade his final season at Florida has paled in comparison to subsequent edge defenders we’ve seen. We learned, as everyone else has, that 2015 was just a really weak edge class.