Everything on NFLDraftBuzz You Are Probably Missing

Somewhere on this site right now, the 2013 Seahawks are lining up against a team that did not exist when they won the Super Bowl. Someone picked the matchup. Someone is calling the coverage. The game is being played out snap by snap, and at the end of it there will be a box score.

You probably came here to read about a linebacker from Georgia.

That is how most people use NFLDraftBuzz. You want to know whether a tackle can handle speed off the edge, you find the scouting report, you read it, you go. Those profiles are what we are known for and they are not going anywhere. They are also roughly a tenth of what is on the site.

Prospect profiles: you have been reading one tab out of three

Start with the page you already know, because you are probably missing most of it. Every prospect profile carries three tabs. Overview is the scouting report you read. The second holds his full combine and workout numbers, or his complete college production. The third is a running news log on him.

Look again at the header while you are there. The circular rating has a small arrow on it, up or down, telling you which way he has moved since we last graded him. Beside it sit his position rank, his 40 time, and six skill meters scored as percentiles against every other player at his position. A 91 in one of those is not a compliment, it is a ranking.

Keep scrolling and there is a bio, honors and awards, strengths, weaknesses, a player comparison, and a summary signed by the scout who wrote it. Then a combine radar chart putting his testing against everyone else at the position, a dated update log showing how our opinion has shifted through the season, and video.

The panel at the bottom is the one to find. It shows how every other scouting service in the industry rates him: an average overall rank, an average position rank, and a chart tracking each individual outlet's opinion of him over time. If we have a player forty spots higher than everyone else, that page will tell on us.

Position rankings and the Buzz Big Board: where we disagree with everyone else

The position rankings run every prospect at every position out to the 2027 class, sortable by rating, height, weight or 40 time. Two columns matter more than the rest. Average position rank and average overall rank aggregate every service we track, so our number and the industry's number sit side by side in the same row. Each position group also gets an athleticism chart plotting 40 times against weight, which is the fastest way to spot the outlier who tested like a different sport.

The Buzz Big Board works the same way. It is our top 100, lined up directly against the biggest boards in the business.

Follow a program rather than a position and the college and conference pages split every class by school. Play Ratings holds the statistical leaderboards. If you just want a name, there is a player and college search.

Draft order, mock drafts and draft value

The draft order is maintained all year, round by round. Check it before you run a mock, because the simulator drafts off it.

The mock draft library carries ours and everyone else's, filterable, so you can put four outlets' first rounds next to each other. Team draft class pages hold what each franchise actually took, going back years.

Then the receipts. Draft value scores every pick in a class against where it should have gone and hands you the steals and the reaches in a league-wide list. Draft Do-Over goes further. It replays a team's real draft one pick at a time and asks what the board would have given them instead, scoring every player on career snaps with bonuses for Pro Bowls and All-Pro seasons. At the end you get a count: how often the general manager beat the best player available, and how often he did not. It covers all 32 teams across several drafts, and some of them do not read well.

We track the all star circuit too, with invite lists for the Senior Bowl and the Shrine Bowl as they land, plus pages for the college bowl games and the prospects playing in them.

The mock draft simulator: five ways to price a trade up

Most readers have run the mock draft simulator at least once. Fewer have gone through the settings, which is where it gets serious.

Pick the draft class first: 2024, 2025, 2026 or 2027, so you can re-run a draft already knowing how it turned out. Then decide what board the computer teams are drafting from, ours or the consensus, which changes their behavior entirely. Rounds, pick clock, draft speed and randomness are all yours, and if you want to run all 32 teams yourself, you can.

Trades are the deep end. The league trades on a value chart and you choose which one: Jimmy Johnson, Fitzgerald-Spielberger, Rich Hill, Harvard, or Chase Stuart. That is not a cosmetic setting. Moving from 12 to 5 costs one thing on the old Johnson chart and something quite different on Chase Stuart's, and teams behave accordingly. Before you send an offer, a gauge tells you how likely it is to be accepted, so you can stop firing hopeless deals into the void. Leave the computer teams trading with each other and the board moves under you while you think.

Every pick shows that team's positional needs, so you can read the room the way the AI reads it, and any prospect's full profile opens inside the draft without losing your place.

You can also do all of this against other people. Build a room for up to 32 users, lock it with a password, put everyone on a clock between thirty seconds and three minutes, pause it when someone's dinner arrives, and talk to the room in live chat while the picks come in.

Draft grades and the Draft Wall: then it marks your work

The moment your draft ends we mark it, and not with a single letter. Every team gets an overall grade plus separate marks for Value, Need, Trades and Future, a tally of steals and reaches, a written review, and a line on every individual pick. You can grade any saved draft, including one somebody else has shared with you.

From there, build a depth chart straight out of the picks you just made and see where your rookies actually land against the players already on that roster. It is the quickest way to find out whether the class you loved fixes anything. You can also drop a saved draft back into the simulator and carry on from the pick where you stopped.

Other people's drafts are worth your time. The Draft Wall is a feed of user mocks you can filter by team, and Most Popular Picks pools thousands of them to show which prospects the readership keeps taking, and where they keep going.

The Game and Fantasy Sim: run Super Bowl XLIX again and give it to Lynch

This is the part almost nobody finds. The Game and Fantasy Sim will play any NFL matchup from 2013 through the coming season, and it takes the season for each side separately. That is the whole trick. The 2013 Seahawks against last year's Ravens is a legal game. So is a Peyton Manning Broncos team against a modern Kansas City. There are one-click cards for a few of those if you want to see it work before you build your own.

Three ways to play it. Instant hands you the result. Watch Live runs it snap by snap on an animated field with the real formations, routes and coverages drawn. Coach gives you the team.

Coach Mode is the reason to make an account. You take the coin toss and decide whether to receive. You call the play, down to run direction, pass depth, and the specific man you want the ball going to. On defense you set the scheme and choose whether to send an extra rusher. Fourth down is yours. So is going for two, your kickoff style, and when to burn a timeout. When a flag goes your way, you accept or decline it. There is a drive chart and a live stats drawer running beside you, and when you have had enough you hand it back and the engine plays out the rest.

Which means you can load Super Bowl XLIX, get to second and goal from the one, and hand the ball to Marshawn Lynch.

Results open into Gamecast, Box Score, Play by Play and Team Stats, and the play by play filters down to scoring plays when the full log gets long. Fantasy points sit on every box score and every leaderboard, and the scoring format switches live between Standard, Half PPR, Full PPR, ESPN, Yahoo, Sleeper, NFL.com, CBS, DraftKings and FanDuel without reloading the page. Save the ones you like, rename them, come back.

The season simulator: a whole year, one week at a time

The same engine runs a full year. Choose the quick route and the season is done in under a minute.

The slower route is better. In a week-by-week season nothing moves until you tell it to. Tick the games you want to coach yourself, sim the week, and the other fifteen play out around you. Your result folds into the standings, the schedule rolls on, and you do it again. Lose patience in November and you can sim the rest.

What comes out the other end is its own small site: Super Bowl odds, projected wins, AFC and NFC playoff seedings, a weekly scoreboard, division standings, team rankings split into offense, defense and special teams, and player leaders across nine categories from passing down to punt returns, with a separate board for the postseason. Every game keeps its box score. Every team gets a page.

Custom teams and leagues: build a roster that never existed

The custom team builder drafts from any season in the database. Start from nothing or copy a real roster from any era as a base, name it, give it an abbreviation, then fill out offense, defense and special teams by searching the player pool position by position, year by year. Assign your returners while you are in there. You do not need an account to build one, only to keep it.

Whatever you build turns up in the game simulator's team list beside the real 32, so you can put it in front of anyone.

Take it further with a custom league. Swap your creations into the 32-team structure, leave the rest as the genuine article, and run full seasons on whatever hybrid you end up with.

Season projections and weekly predictions: where we think the bookmaker is wrong

Our season projection plays the coming year hundreds of times over and averages it out into projected records for all 32 teams, playoff odds, Super Bowl odds and league-wide statistical leaders. Every team has its own page where a written preview argues the case for its number, with projected player stats underneath.

In season, weekly predictions cover the full slate, and each game gets a page with projected team stats, projected leaders and a matchup breakdown.

Sitting on every one of those game cards is something we rarely make noise about: a bet value rating out of five stars, a badge naming the side we think has an edge and how many points that edge is worth, our model's spread against the market line, and a lean on the total. It is the simulation arguing with the sportsbook in public.

Madden ratings: every rating the game has ever given

We hold the lot, going back through the whole history of the game, searchable by year, by team and by player, with type-ahead search on every page in the section.

A player's page shows his rating in every edition he ever appeared in, attribute by attribute, alongside career milestones, the peers who shared his era, and the highest rated players in his franchise's history. Watching a great player's speed rating decline across six editions is its own kind of obituary.

The leaderboards are where the arguments start. All-time top hundreds for any attribute, speed, throw power, awareness, hit power, each one filterable by decade and position group. There is a page for the 99 Club, the short list of players who ever hit a 99 overall, and one for the players Madden kept rating the longest.

The depth chart creator: rosters you can tear up

Open the depth chart creator, pick a team, and its whole lineup is laid out by position group. Then take it apart. Drag players up and down the depth, pull in anyone in the database through search, collapse the groups you do not care about or hide the empty positions altogether. Save it and it lives in your account. Share it and everyone else can see what you did to their team.

It is also the natural end of a mock draft, which is where most people should use it: draft a class, build the chart, find out that your new left tackle is still behind someone.

NFL rosters, player pages and historical standings

Team rosters cover every franchise across seasons, with a page for each player carrying an overall rating, a key positional grade, and a year-by-year grade table with color-coded tiers you can open up season by season. Historical standings go back through the archive.

On the home page, two league tables few people notice: colleges ranked by how much top-250 talent they have produced, and the same thing by conference. Useful ammunition in an argument about which program actually develops players.

Everything you make lands in one place. My Stuff holds your mock drafts, depth charts, draft rooms, custom teams, leagues, saved season sims and saved game sims. Make your profile public and other readers can browse your drafts and charts.

Everything on the site, in one list

Prospects: scouting reports · position rankings · Buzz Big Board · colleges and conferences · Play Ratings · search · all star rosters

The draft: draft order · mock draft library · team draft classes · draft value, steals and reaches · Draft Do-Over

Draft tools: mock draft simulator · draft grades · depth chart creator · big board builder · Draft Wall · Most Popular Picks

Simulation: Game and Fantasy Sim · Coach Mode · full and week-by-week seasons · custom teams · custom leagues

Projections: season projection · team by team · weekly predictions and bet value

NFL data: Madden ratings · Madden leaderboards · rosters and player pages · historical standings

Start here

Pick a game you have never stopped thinking about. Load it in the simulator, take the losing side, and call it yourself. Nobody is grading you on that one.