Behind The Steel Curtain

With the college football regular season concluded and the playoff field set, it feels like the perfect time to break out the first mock draft of the 2025 Draft season. I can already hear some of the internet ghosts yelling at their screen that it’s too early, but you can kindly take your Bah Humbug attitude elsewhere. This one is for all my NFL Draft sickos. Don’t apologize for being built different! Not only will this exercise help us familiarize ourselves with some of the prospects, but I enjoy looking back at what mocks were projecting in December and seeing how drastically they’ve shifted by the final mocks being submitted before the draft. I’ve always been a draft nerd, and last year, 31 of the 34 players I highlighted in my “Bargain Drafting” series made their team’s 53-man roster after summer cutdowns, so I’d like to think I’ve started to get a decent feel for the process. To conduct this draft, I used PFF’s Mock Draft simulator, picking from the 27th spot, the position where Pittsburgh would be drafting from if the season ended today. All height and weight measurements provided below are per PFF’s database. Those will shift once players are measured at the NFL Combine, but for now, they’re what we’ve got. I tuned the simulator’s sliders to have a higher priority for teams’ positions of need as well as a preference for positional value. Let’s dive in!