After weeks of anticipation – or months, if your favorite team was eliminated early from 2015 playoff contention – the 2016 NFL draft finally gets underway tonight in Chicago. Pro Football Rumors will have you covered for the entire three-day event, passing along all 253 picks, along with all the trades, news, and rumors that come along with the draft.
While ESPN and NFL Network reporters typically don’t scoop teams’ draft picks before they’re announced on the TV broadcast, writers from other outlets have been known to report picks a few minutes before they’re officially announced. If and when that happens this year, we won’t be “spoiling” picks ahead of time on our social media accounts, so if you want to be kept in suspense until commissioner Roger Goodell makes his announcements, you’re safe to follow us on Twitter or Facebook without having to worry that those surprises will be ruined.
However, if a trusted reporter does get word of a pick before it happens, we’ll be passing it along on our site. So if teams’ picks are being reported ahead of time, and you want to know them immediately rather than waiting for an announcement from Goodell, be sure to refresh ProFootballRumors.com early and often tonight. Our post recapping the first-round results will be updated with teams’ picks as soon as they’re reported, even if that happens before they’re formally announced on ESPN.
With that in mind, here’s some info to get you prepared for the 2016 draft:
- The schedule for this year’s draft is as follows:
- Day 1 (Thursday): Round 1, 7:00pm CT
- Day 2 (Friday): Rounds 2-3, 6:00pm CT
- Day 3 (Saturday) Rounds 4-7, 11:00am CT
- For an idea of how the first round might play out, you can check out our most recent mock draft, published this morning. Our first mock provided some alternate scenarios, though it was published before the Rams and Eagles traded up to the top of the draft.
- PFR’s Rob DiRe posted his breakdown of the top 15 prospects at each position this week. You can find his offensive rankings right here, and his defensive rankings here.
- Want to find this year’s full draft order? We’ve got all 253 selections listed here.
- We also took a closer look at how exactly this year’s traded picks changed hands, and how 2016’s 33 compensatory picks were assigned.
- All of our posts discussing news and rumors related to the 2016 draft can be found on this page, though given how much the draft has dominated the NFL news cycle lately, it doesn’t look much different from our main page at this point.