Kiper Vs. McShay Vs. Mayock Death Match: Who's The Best Mock Drafter?

PunditTracker|published: Tue 6th May, 16:51 2014

With the NFL Draft pundits rolling out their final mock drafts this week, which one should you pay the most attention to?

We have graded the Round 1 mock drafts of Mel Kiper (ESPN), Todd McShay (ESPN), and Mike Mayock (NFL.com) for each of the past six years (2008-2013). Here are the results.

Let's start with our simple variability measure, which is based on the difference between when each player was projected to be picked and when he was actually picked. A lower variability score is better:

Variability	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	Average
Mayock	7.3	9.6	9.9	9.3	7.9	10.7	9.1
Kiper	10.1	8.8	10.4	7.7	8.5	11.7	9.6
McShay	10.7	8.7	8.8	6.8	7.0	21.5	10.6

Mike Mayock has posted the best average. Todd McShay had a great run from 2009-12 but stumbled badly last year (as did all of the pundits, but McShay did even worse).

Here are all the individual major Hits and Misses from the pundits for each of the years:

Biggest Hits and Misses (2008-2013)

The variability metric can be significantly impacted by "outliers" such as McShay picking Ryan Nassib to go #7 last year (he went #110), so we have calculated a few alternative metrics, including Median Error and Hit Rate.

Median Error (lower = better)

Median Error	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	Average
Mayock	2.0	4.0	3.0	3.0	3.5	3.5	3.2
Kiper	3.0	3.5	3.0	4.0	3.0	3.5	3.4
McShay	4.0	4.0	3.0	3.5	3.0	5.0	3.8

Hit Rate (higher = better): pure percentage of how many picks were correct

Hit Rate	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	Average
Mayock	35%	28%	22%	28%	19%	28%	27%
Kiper	29%	25%	31%	28%	22%	25%	27%
McShay	16%	25%	34%	25%	16%	22%	23%

We will be back next week with our grades for this year's mock drafts.

For those new to PunditTracker, we aim to level the prediction playing field by allowing users to compete with the 'experts'. Head over to our NFL Draft section to make some of your own predictions for the 2014 Draft using the 'Vote Now' buttons.

Originally published on PunditTracker. PunditTracker's mission is to bring accountability to the prediction industry by cataloging and scoring the predictions of pundits.

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