Is it too early to talk about the 2025 NFL Draft? For the teams that have limped out of the gate this season, perhaps not.
So, how did Week 3 shake up the potential 2025 draft order?
To get an update on where things stand, we turn to Austin Mock’s projections. Mock projects the score for every game and the final winning percentage for every team using his NFL betting model. The model phases out older data and uses data from this year as the season progresses. The simulation then runs 100,000 times after each day of games to give us, in this case, our projected top-10 draft order, plus each team’s projected win total and playoff chances.
You can take a deeper dive into Mock’s playoff model here. The latest projected top 10 for April’s draft:
Projected top 10 (as of Sept. 24)
A few thoughts on this week’s projections from The Athletic NFL Draft expert Nick Baumgardner:
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If the Titans finish this season with the No. 1 pick, odds are the Will Levis era in Tennessee will be over, or at least firmly on the back burner. At the same time, the 2025 QB class is not as deep as the one we saw this past spring. Georgia quarterback Carson Beck likely stands as the current QB1 and, so long as he finishes this year strong, he’d be a fair choice in the top three of the ’25 draft.
But what about QB2? If the Giants land as high a pick as they do in our projections (No. 2), it’ll be time for a new quarterback in New York, as well. Should Tennessee or another QB-needy team snag Beck at No. 1, the question would become: Is there another quarterback in this class worth a top-three pick? How about a top-five pick? Top 15?
Those are fair questions right now, as the pack following Beck — Shedeur Sanders, Quinn Ewers, Drew Allar, etc. — has hardly erased all doubts about their respective futures.
Any team that had an opportunity to address the QB position this past spring and didn’t may come to regret it. It’ll be interesting to see which teams add prospective starting QBs via the 2025 draft and which choose to spend capital on younger players like Justin Fields, Trey Lance or others who’ve been previously cast aside.
The good news in Cleveland right now: The Browns have a first-round pick again. And … that’s it. That’s the list.
The Deshaun Watson situation seemingly has turned into a race to determine whether or not Cleveland can get out of Watson’s nightmarish deal before 2026. If the Browns (somehow) can, they — like, potentially, the Giants, Titans, Raiders, Dolphins, Saints and others — will be firmly in the quarterback market.
That said, as we’re seeing this September, Cleveland also needs plenty of help elsewhere. On top of having a severely underperforming, high-priced QB, multiple seasons with light draft capital have taken a massive toll on the offensive side of the ball.
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After looking like the worst team in football over the first two weeks of the season, Carolina flipped the script by swapping a struggling Bryce Young for veteran QB Andy Dalton in a 36-22 win at Las Vegas. With that, our first look here at the projected draft order has the Panthers outside the top five (and barely in the top 10).
Don’t be surprised if that’s how it happens. Many of Carolina’s problems in the first two weeks were due to Young being totally broken as an NFL player. The Saints scored 47 points in a Week 1 win over Carolina, but they also had the advantage of three turnovers and fewer than 200 yards of offense by the Panthers.
Carolina’s offensive line was very good last week, though, and has been better than the numbers have shown overall. Dalton has given a young team confidence, and the Panthers have winnable games all over their last-place schedule the rest of the way.
(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; photos of Deshaun Watson, Will Levis and Daniel Jones: Wesley Hitt, Jason Miller, Nic Antaya / Getty Images)
