This Week At MockingBoard - 04.20.2026

Hello everyone! I am very excited to say that it is NFL Draft week. For many of us, myself included, this is legitimately more exciting than the actual Super Bowl. Every draft cycle presents us with unlimited potential for both positive and negative outcomes that no one could see coming. Day 3 receivers might take over the league, or a day 1 OL might never crack the starting lineup. What often amounts to years worth of work all comes down to 3 days of wheeling, dealing, and selecting. I don't know about you, but I couldn't be more thrilled. In fact, this year I will be attending the NFL Draft in person in Pittsburgh! So, what all will be happening with MockingBoard this week, and what might be happening after?

New Updates

I'll be very upfront and say that I don't plan on any major updates this week. This week's updates will mostly be focused on a few fronts: bug fixes/minor patches, setting up an automated real time draft tracker for the Draft Day tab (code is complete), and getting new data added. I'd like to avoid any major updates this week as those will always, by nature, have a higher risk of introducing new bugs, and I just frankly don't want to do that during draft week. However, I do think the new updates coming are things you guys will enjoy. Let's talk about them in some depth.

So That Countdown Page...

By now, I'm sure a good number of you have checked out the Draft Day tab and seen a picture of Pittsburgh with a countdown to the first day of the NFL Draft. You might be wondering what this page turns into at the end. I won't keep you all waiting, it turns into a dedicated live update experience for the NFL Draft. I will also be upfront and say that although I've tested the page a ton with 2025 data, this is also my first "live event" style page. If there are issues, as always, give me a shout. I'll get them remedied before the next day. Now, originally, the plan I had was to manually input data as things came in. This, of course, is not scalable, but I also didn't really have any way to get real-time draft data going. Luckily, ESPN's public APIs do offer us a solution to this problem, so I am opting to use that instead. This will be much more reliable than me trying to enter things on my own.

Hey Isn't There a Draft Contest Page Too?

Why yes, dear friends, there is! I'm so glad you asked. Basically since the site has been live, I have been running a mini draft contest in the background. How do you enter? Simple, literally any solo mock draft (that was not marked as private) where you control all teams was auto-entered. Don't worry, there is no money or anything like that involved, and as always your data is never going anywhere. There will simply be a fun leaderboard after the first round of the draft showing who had the most accurate mock draft. With the recent trade of Dexter Lawrence for the 10th overall pick, I would suggest making some new ones. If you happen to win the draft contest, you get a fun little extra badge on your profile. This is purely cosmetic, and there is no difference here between Free and Pro users. No Pay-To-win mechanics or anything like that.

What Happens When The Draft is Over?

One of the most common mock drafting traditions is to make a Way Too Early mock draft for the following season immediately following the conclusion of the current draft. I am of course looking to support this endeavour, and luckily, thanks to one of my dear friends (shoutout Riley) who has put countless hours into putting this together, we will have a preliminary 2027 board with 450+ players on it ready for you on Saturday night following the conclusion of the 2026 NFL Draft. If you're looking to kick the 2027 scouting season off right, then there will be no better place to do your scouting and mock drafts than right here. If there is a major update this week, then this is it.

Some Other Notes

Part of what I want to do here is maintain transparency, so I'm going to do that. Last week, I invested in and committed to the next 3 years of infrastructure for MockingBoard. If you were wondering if this project of mine was going to get abandoned or something, well, that should help inform you. This 3 year investment also helps me reduce costs on infrastructure over that span by around 63% (at least as things are currently setup).

I also want to talk a bit about where you'll see things going this summer when the draft is over. One, I'll be working on getting those Arcade modes finished out. They are, code wise, the most complex part of the site by a country mile. Getting them right just takes more time than other things. The one I am most personally excited about is the Trivia mode. In preparation for this, I also added a mechanic for punishment players. This mechanic is already available to use in multiple modes, and lets you set up a group of players that the CPU will pick from if a user in a draft essentially fails to meet a given condition (right now, that would just be time). This gives a fun twist to auto-draft, where instead of the dread of not knowing who the CPU will take, now you know who the CPU will take, and it isn't good.

The Road Ahead

You'll see a lot more about this during the summer, but the roadmap for this site is extensive. This summer, I will begin work on MockingBoard Fantasy. A no gambling, no ads, social and community first fantasy football experience. This will of course get many of its own posts, but this is something I am very excited to begin work on. I am targeting the 2026 season as a beta launch, with 2027 as the full launch. There will be a lot of first in market features as part of this, so this will genuinely be a unique take on fantasy football. As just one example, no more pre-written blurbs from Rotoworld about players. There will be something else, much more community driven, in its place. The great thing about fantasy is that I can reuse most of the draft infrastructure I've built here for fantasy drafts. The foundation, in that sense, already exists.

Final Thoughts

Draft week baby. Nothing better. I hope you all have a great time this week, and I hope your team gets whoever it is you want to them to get. We've built a great foundation together, but rest assured, this is only the beginning. I look forward to what we can continue to build.