As we approach Super Bowl Sunday the media explodes onto the scene in East Rutherford, New Jersey, with the focus on our contending teams: Seattle and Denver. But for the rest of the National Football League this is a time of reflection and contemplation. The 30 teams not participating in Super Bowl XLVIII need to figure out how to be where the Seahawks and the Broncos are today. Teams will use a combination of resigning players on their own team or obtaining talent through free agency to get better. Another means of acquiring players is through the 2014 NFL draft and that’s where we will be concentrating our efforts in order to keep all of the GmenHQ.com readers informed. Over the course of the next few months we will keep an eye on all news related to the NFL Combine, Pro days and all other draft materials.
The NFL draft is an opportunity for teams to use their scouting department to find the next great player; the next Bruce Smith, Lawrence Taylor, Jerry Rice, or Joe Namath. All of the athletes have their strengths and weaknesses and it will be thru the evaluation process where teams will choose their top targets for each round. But as we have seen, scouts can be very wrong, like when they recommended selecting Akili Smith in 1999 ahead of both Champ Bailey and Brandon Stokley, both of whom will be playing in this year’s Super Bowl. None of us will truly know how any of the soon-to-be pros will pan out. What we do know is the needs of each of the 32 NFL teams, and it’s our guess on who they will be looking to target in the first round of the 2014 NFL Draft.
** Each of the top 8 teams this year have a void to fill on the offensive line, however offensive linemen are not always top priorities for a bad team. Bad teams typically want to make a splash at the top of the draft. That’s why quarterback’s get all the attention as well as explosive type defensive players, ala Jadeveon Clowney. Once the combine has taken place in February we will have more information to help make better decisions, but for now we have completed our first 2014 NFL mock draft for you.