2020 NFL Draft: First-Round 2020 NFL mock draft with counterintuitive picks throughout

Tired of the same old mock drafts? Think the experts are way off on who your team should be drafting in the 2020 NFL Draft? Well here is your chance to see scenarios you won’t see in any other mock draft. Welcome to the 2020 NFL Draft: Contrarians Edition.

In this mock draft, we’ll take a look at who the general consensus pick is for each NFL team and then flip the pick on its head. If everyone else is saying quarterback, this draft says defensive lineman. If the popular pick is for your team to take a wide receiver, guess what, they are picking a safety.

Why make a contrarian mock draft? While the media and mock draft community study NFL teams and their needs all year round, often first-round draft picks are selected by teams for a variety of reasons outside of obvious roster needs.

Sometimes a team gets antsy about a veteran on the last year of his contract and wants a fresh start at the position. Sometimes a new coach comes in and wants a clean slate, with a different set of players to entrust their football vision to. Other times the owner likes a prospect and who is going to tell the owner they are wrong?

Sometimes it may seem like one position on the team is their greatest need when in actuality the team is in need of a full makeover. The best example of this in recent history was the Cleveland Browns. After drafting Johnny Manziel in 2014, the team released him a month before the 2016 NFL Draft. Rather than using their first-round picks on a quarterback in 2016 or 2017, they preferred to trade their first-rounders to other teams for draft capital down the line.

The Browns had three first-round picks in 2017 and each was used to draft skill position players. So that when 2018 rolled around and they had the first overall pick again, they would have a few elite players on the roster ready to contribute.

It’s important to think outside the box when it comes to selecting college talent. In the 2020 NFL Draft, there will almost certainly be some unexpected players going in the first round. Who thought Daniel Jones was going to be drafted sixth overall in 2019? Who expected Clelin Ferrell to be taken fourth? Other than the general managers of their respective draft teams, probably very few.

As time goes on and draft experts become more and more self-aware of the disconnect between pre-draft predictions and actual draft results, analysts begin to start forecasting the draft in unconventional ways.

None of the draft picks will be selected at random in this contrarians mock. Instead, this mock draft will determine an alternative target for the drafting team instead of the mainstream, expected player. It will use a variety of metrics, including player statistics, draft history and other team needs. The positional value of each position will, of course, be factored in and an explanation for why each pick, no matter how counterintuitive, will be made.

Welcome to the contrarian’s edition of the 2020 NFL Draft.