At the end of the day, NFL draft grades don’t mean a whole lot. No one knows anything until several years down the road, but that’s not how the world works right now. If everyone waited enough time until certain prospects and decisions matured enough to warrant discussion, there’d be an incredible lack of content around the sports world, not just in football.
So with that in mind, we’re going to talk about draft grades for the Chargers, but not just a small random group of them. A wonderful Twitter account owned by Rene Bugner took 26 different evaluators who posted draft grades, including those from NFL.com, ESPN, PFF, and CBS Sports.
Using the traditional GPA format, the Chargers earned the third-best GPA among all NFL teams with a 3.72. For those who don’t recall, that’s just above an “A-”-average (3.67).
Overall the Chargers’ grades break down as such: A+ (3), A (8), A- (7), B+ (6), B (2)
Despite all the surprise and frustration from the team’s third-round picks and subsequent day-three selections, the majority of insiders, analysts, and writers seem to believe the Chargers walked away with one of the best draft classes this year. Seriously.
After sleeping on it for a few days, and allowing myself to be a bit more open-minded to what this year’s process like involved, especially in another offseason affected by the ongoing pandemic, the Chargers chose to lower the the risk of missing on their picks by leaning on players with experience and connections to current staff members.
Five of the team’s nine players were participants in this year’s Senior Bowl while two other players (Chris Rumph II and Nick Niemann) have fathers who are either coaching professionally or at the collegiate level. This factors likely led to them forgoing several opportunities to draft sliding talent in favor of experience and traits that easily translate to Sundays.
Now that you’ve gotten time to sleep, relax, and think on it, have your initial thoughts on the Chargers’ draft class lightened up at all? Do you still view it the same as when you did on Saturday afternoon or has it changed?