Mock drafts are fun. They’re not supposed to be taken seriously. You know that, I know that, but others tend to lose a bit of perspective.Some see a mock and turn into college basketball fans who tell you who and where their team is playing in the NCAA Tournament according to Bracketology.Over the last few years, sports media has figured out that not much drives traffic this time of year like mock drafts. On Monday, I saw a newspaper from one city promoting its inclusion in a mock of another city’s newspaper. Quality content? Nah, just guaranteed clicks.Since BBR launched so close to the draft, we can kinda/sorta get away with not doing mocks this year. But we’d be cutting off our nose to spite our face if we ignored them in the future. Sometimes you have to play the game. Our goal will always be to play smart.There are actually a decent number of mock drafts done by folks who really know their stuff. Yet they can admit they’ll get more wrong than they’ll get right, and their inside knowledge isn’t mainly used to artificially spike pageviews.Unfortunately, it’s hard to separate the good ones from the bad because of sheer volume. Mock drafts have become BuzzFeedish, and yes, I’m making up a term there.Clickbait stinks, and that’s why I’m standing on this soapbox. Sure, fans are doing the clicking, and most understand how much of a crap shoot predicting the draft is, but they’re being disserviced by mock draft proliferation. Not only do the better-informed mocks get lost in the shuffle, but actual reporting and true analysis do as well.

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So here are some smart pieces I’ve run across the last few days. There’s a lot of good work being done ahead of this draft, and hopefully you’ll enjoy a very small sample.

• While this piece still would have taken him a decent chunk of time, it would have been much easier for Will Brinson to dig up the data and leave it at that. But he included 64 examples in this breakdown of what each first-round slot has meant since 2002.
• Another from CBS Sports: Imagine how the Panthers’ 2011 draft would look in this infographic if they didn’t take Cam Newton.
• Yup, it’s amazing how much choosing the right quarterback can help a team that makes many more mistakes.
• “In ‘real’ football, the ‘fantasy’ mindset is thrown in the trash when it comes to draft picks and team building.”
• Safety has become an increasingly important position. How many mocks have been willing to place a safety in Carolina?
• An interactive chart showing percentages of where players should land in the first round? Yes, please.

BBR Nuggets:

• Luke Kuechly, pace car driver.
• From Kuechly’s Old Spice media tour last Friday, an interview with SBNation.
• TMZ-stalking looks awful, but hey, at least the Panthers have a quarterback who’s worth being TMZ-stalked?
• Frank Alexander apologizes, via NFLPA statement.
• Byron Bell signed his second-round tender, #asexpected.

Coming Up:

• Not many know college football as well as ESPN’s Travis Haney. He’s our guest for the next BBR Podcast, which we’re going to record Wednesday. He can answer plenty about the Panthers, but you can send us any other draft-related questions. We plan to spend a good amount of time on Twitter-submitted questions again.

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