The 2020 NFL season is not yet complete, with only the Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to play – no Buckeyes in that. But for most teams, the season has come to an end. This means that the focus is on construction for next year and, while the free agency is yet to happen, the main source of escalation construction comes to the NFL Draft.
In the past few weeks, since the end of the college football season, qualified players have decided whether to declare themselves for this spring’s NFL Draft or return for another season at school. Several players from Ohio State chose to go on to the NFL after productive careers in Columbus, which means there must be another talented class of Buckeyes for the teams to choose from.
Although we don’t know the final draft order until after the Super Bowl in early February and the needs of the teams will change to some degree over the months to come before the draft, there is enough information out there to start diving into the simulated drafts. On Tuesday, ESPN’s Mel Kiper released his initial projections for the first round of the draft and there are some surprises from the perspective of Scarlet and Gray.
The first is that Kiper has a former Ohio State defender Justin Fields, long considered the second best defender in the draft, dropping to seventh place for the Detroit Lions. In Kiper’s simulated draft, Fields is the third defender off the board, following Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence (No. 1 overall for Jacksonville Jaguars) and BYU’s Zach Wilson (No. 4 overall for the Atlanta Falcons).
Here’s what Kiper wrote about Fields and the choice after giving “a slight advantage for Wilson for now “:
Things change quickly in the NFL. Before the news on Saturday that Lions would negotiate quarterback Matthew Stafford in this off season, I would have said that they should keep Stafford and try to help him with a wide receiver in this draft. Alabama’s Jaylen Waddle would have fit here. But instead, it looks like the new general manager Brad Holmes and the trainer Dan Campbell goes all-in on a rebuild, and then Fields can be the face of it. He had a season of ups and downs, but we saw flashes of his talent, especially in his performance of six touchdowns against Clemson in the College Football Playoff semifinal. Fields has the potential of a superstar, but he will need help near him. Detroit will need to find out what it is doing with free agents Kenny Golladay and Marvin Jones Jr. and make sure that Fields has a chance of success in the first year.
The strange narrative that Fields had “a season of ups and downs” is perpetuated by Kiper in this simulated draft, and perhaps some GMs and NFL coaches will agree. But Fields had at least 300 yards of total attack and a minimum of three touchdowns in each regular season game this season. Then there was the record Playoff performance Kiper alluded to, followed by a mediocre national championship game against Alabama, where an injured Fields still managed 261 yards of total attack.
Those games that some believe to be “down” were the Indiana game and Northwestern’s performance. While Fields threw three interceptions against a Hoosiers defender who finished second in the country by forcing the opposing quarterback to throw the ball at them, he also launched for 300 yards, had 78 running yards and a total of three touchdowns. Against Northwestern in the Big Ten Championship Game, Fields was not himself with just 114 passing yards and two interceptions, but he was without his top wide receiver in Chris Olave against a top-20 pass defense.
If the NFL teams look at Fields’ two years in Ohio and don’t believe he’s one of the two best defenders, that’s up to them. But it’s hard to imagine a player who had 5,701 passing yards and 67 touchdowns for nine interceptions in his college career while playing in the SEC and Big Ten and appearing in two college football playoffs, where he performed well, staying out of the top five. .
The other strange thing about Kiper’s first simulated sketch is that Fields is the only Buckeye he left the board in the first round. The main scorn here is the former scarlet and gray guard Wyatt Davis, who was a unanimous All-American in 2020. Instead, Kiper has five other strikers on the line being selected in the first round, none of whom achieved as much as Davis did in Ohio.
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A lot is going to change before the NFL Draft actually starts in late April, but it is strange to see players who helped the Buckeyes to the national championship receiving so little love at the beginning of the process.