Charles RobinsonSenior reporterWed, April 22, 2026 at 6:32 AM UTC·12 min readBig Boards: Consensus Top 75 • Nate Tice • Charles McDonald | Draft guide

With the NFL Draft upon us, we finally get around to what we’ve known for months — and what we’ve debated for what has seemed like an eternity.

Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza is going to be the first overall pick. And Alabama quarterback Ty Simpson is going to get drafted ... well …somewhere.

All secrets will be revealed by the end of Saturday night — at which point we can prematurely grade everyone’s performance and argue over which team stole the show or blew the entire draft. Before we do that, it’s worth breaking down how the top of positional stacks appear to have shaped up since the scouting combine in late March. After spending almost two months talking to a swath of evaluators in preparation for this year’s All-Juice Team, I got a better understanding of how some teams and their talent evaluators have stacked up each position along the way.

In the process, we can now give you what we believe is the order of the talent stack at the top of each position in the draft, based on evaluations of various personnel sources from 10 different teams. It’s not a perfect snapshot of all 32 franchises, and the information has been gathered during the height of the league’s lying season. But broad commonalities emerged from the cross section of evaluators, offering a reasonable thumbnail of how the talent stacks are likely to unfold in this draft. Starting with quarterback, for example.

Peering through the dustup over Simpson’s talent and where he should be ranked among his fellow quarterbacks — and tuning out and last-minute nonsensical second-guessing about Mendoza — at least three things emerged about the quarterbacks:

First, Mendoza swept the board in the quarterback stack without much fanfare. All 10 evaluators put him at the top of the quarterback class and didn’t think twice about it.

Second, Simpson swept the second spot in the stack among evaluators and did it about as easily as Mendoza took the top spot.

Third, Miami’s Carson Beck may very well end up being the third quarterback off the board, and there’s a chance he squeezes into the tail end of the third round.

That last one was surprising to me — and it’s certainly not set in stone. Beck had plenty of hot or cold reactions when he was being slotted into the stack by evaluators. Two liked him enough to suggest he could be a third-round pick. Several others loathed aspects of his profile and put him a country mile behind LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier. At times, the disparity was enough that I threw the stack out to some other longtime evaluators with general manager experience just to see if Beck being the aggregate No. 3 in the quarterback stack seemed right.

Carson Beck has a shot at landing in Round 3 of this NFL Draft. (Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images)

“100-percent,” an NFC executive replied. “Bigger than Nussmeier. More success. Better worker. I don’t think Beck is great, but Nuss is a wild card in a bad class.”

So in a draft touted to have some possibly worthwhile middle-round dart throws at quarterback, the stack spit out Beck’s name as the first quarterback after we got past Mendoza and Simpson. It might not be revelatory, as I’ve seen some respected analysts scoot Beck up their overall prospect rankings as the draft sifting has gone on. But it’s interesting in that the aggregate slotted Beck at the third quarterback spot in the stack and when it was back-checked with other personnel executives, it had some weight.

With that in mind, here are the rest of the positions in this weekend’s draft and a snapshot of how evaluators from 10 different teams stacked the top end of each position …

There’s a strong chance only two running backs are taken in the first two rounds: Jeremiyah Love inside the top 10 picks and his Notre Dame backup Jadarian Price somewhere in the second round. Love is in the top five of most boards. Price’s assessment varies considerably. A few evaluators are stacking him in a range that would fit into the top of the second round, others in the middle of the second, and the remainder from the middle of the second to the top of the third. Interestingly, Arkansas’ Mike Washington Jr. — who had a monster performance at the scouting combine — had only two teams stacking him into a range that would fit in the tail end of the second round. The rest are pegging him in the top half of the third round. Nebraska’s Emmett Johnson and Washington’s Jonah Coleman were split between teams as the fourth or fifth running back, with each falling into a range equating to the middle of the third round to the top of the fourth.

It’s shaping up to be another deep class that packs into the first two rounds, with as many as nine receivers stacked inside the top 60 to 70 players on boards. As anticipated, the big three — Arizona State’s Jordyn Tyson, Ohio State’s Carnell Tate and USC’s Makai Lemon — were all stacked in a range that will put them in the first round. The top wideout slot was a closer split between Tyson and Tate than has been predicted in most mock drafts. Tate was slotted higher than Tyson for most evaluators, but Tyson got the nod as the top wideout on a few boards. Neither was slotted as a top-five pick by teams.

The real intrigue is shaping up in the next trio of Texas A&M’s KC Concepcion, Indiana’s Omar Cooper and Washington’s Denzel Boston. All three were stacked as the fourth wideout by at least one team. Concepcion was fourth on most boards, followed by Cooper and then Boston. One team had Boston stacked in a manner that would potentially translate as low as the top of the third round.

The position is basically Oregon’s Kenyon Sadiq and then a ledge. Every evaluator had Sadiq stacked in a manner that would translate into the middle of the first round. One team pegged him inside the top 10, while three others had him slotted in spots that would land him in the lower third of the first round. Vanderbilt’s Eli Stowers was comfortably stacked as the second tight end and with a position that would translate into late second-round territory. Ohio State’s Max Klare was the consensus third tight end, with valuations putting him in a territory that would translate late in the second to early in the third. There was a sizable gap after Klare, with Georgia’s Oscar Delp averaging a top 100 player range that translated consistently to an end of the third/top of the fourth draft spot.

For teams casting a line for an offensive tackle, this is going to be one of the more drama-filled talent stacks in the draft. Not only from the standpoint of sorting out players who are close to one another in terms of their talent, but also from the standpoint of the shelf. Essentially, all the evaluators were in agreement on one thing: If you’re going to take an offensive tackle, you had better get yours early.

Teams came to a consensus that there are basically six first-round tackles — Miami’s Francis Mauigoa, Utah’s Spencer Fano, Georgia’s Monroe Freeling, Alabama’s Kadyn Proctor, Utah’s Caleb Lomu and Clemson’s Blake Miller. Arizona State’s Max Iheanachor also had a few teams stack him in the top 30-35. How they’ll all sort out will be the theater on draft night, with Mauigoa and Fano both having teams stack them as their top tackle prospect. The same goes for Proctor and Freeling for the third tackle spot. Both players had teams stack them as the third offensive tackle. Some evaluators also had Iheanachor ahead of Miller.