2020 NFL Draft: Mock draft if the 2019 college season was canceled

2020 NFL Draft: What if the 2019 college season was never played?

It’s a bizarre rabbit hole to go down, but what if the 2019 college football season had never been played?

The 2020 NFL Draft, as we know it, would be completely different.

It feels like the 2020 NFL Draft was already impacted pretty significantly with such a substantial number of players unable to take part in a pro day because schools were forced to cancel them due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but what if the 2019 season had never happened?

Assuming the 2020 NFL Draft order would have remained the same, it’s impossible to make any sort of accurate projection of this because the 2020 NFL Draft class and whatever players would be available in such a scenario would have also impacted 2020 free agency in the NFL. Let’s just assume for the moment that everything else was the same.

The way things currently are in the United States, pessimism is growing that a college football season will be played normally, if at all. Conferences are already announcing they will be doing conference-only schedules if games are played because they will be able to keep their schools in controlled environments with conference-sanctioned testing.

It’s possible that COVID-19 in 2020 is taking us to an alternate football universe in 2021, and to illustrate just how substantial not having a college season in 2020 would be, I want to look at what the first round of the 2020 NFL Draft might have looked like if the 2019 college season was canceled.

No Joe Burrow, at least not Heisman Joe Burrow. No Tua Tagovailoa injury.

Let’s say all of the same players declared themselves eligible and NFL teams were forced to go off of the data they had prior to 2019 to make their selections.