This Week At MockingBoard - 05.04.2026 — MockingBoard Blog

New Beginnings

Just like that, the 2026 NFL Draft has come and gone. Seven rounds, 257 players, and of course a slew of UDFAs. Newly drafted and signed rookies are getting acquainted with their new teammates and draft analysts everywhere are taking a well-deserved break. This has included myself, although this break would not have been as pronounced had I not been extremely sick in the prior week. However, this now leads everyone in the draft world into the all-important question of: now what?

For some, and I've already seen it on here, they have gotten right to 2027 Draft scouting. There are hundreds of players to scout, and in that sense, time is of the essence. Here on MockingBoard, we have a preliminary list of over 650 prospects to work from for the 2027 class, so if you want to get started, the resources are available. For others, the classic Way-Too-Early mock drafts are already going. There is always fun to be had to compare the way too early mocks with your end of cycle mocks in 11 months from now. It's often shocking how wildly boards change, how some players rise, and how others fall. It's never too early for a Way Too Early mock draft, so get a few in now!

The Road Ahead

A site that is built for mock drafts and scouting is seemingly not very needed as we hit the NFL dead zone, but regardless, I want to talk about the road ahead for MockingBoard and give everyone here some insight as to where things are going over the next set of months. I'll be upfront with everyone, the blitz of feature addition that was going on in March and April will not be happening again on here. The pace of work will simply be somewhat slower on here. That does not mean I'm not doing things, and that doesn't mean there won't be more updates to come here. So let's dive into what's coming next and where I will be focusing my attention. I won't be giving any sort of timelines or estimates here.

Expansion of Arcade modes - One of my original stretch goals for the 2026 Draft which ultimately had to be de-prioritized was really fleshing out the various arcade modes. These are one of the most unique aspects of MockingBoard when it comes to differentiation to other platforms, and unfortunately, arcade modes are the most challenging to build out. I'll be transparent and say that I am not a game developer, and the arcade modes are basically game development wrapped in a web app. These just take time and often require much more testing and thought than most other regions on the site. The primary mode I would like to get done next is the Trivia mode. A lot of the foundation has been laid, but there is also a challenge in managing to get my hands on 2500+ trivia questions and then managing to label them such that they can be asked at appropriate times. After that will be a mode that involves randomly assigned buffs and debuffs. If you are familiar with the game Balatro, the inspiration is coming from there. You can think of bluffs as rounds and the buffs and debuffs as jokers. The analogy doesn't really carry beyond this, but it provides a good starting point.
More and better analytics - As the the amount of activity on the site grows, I want to harness the data that naturally generates to build a better experience for everyone in a variety of ways. One of my main goals is to build a recommendation engine, where the site can suggest prospects to you that you don't have notes but potentially align with the types of players you rate highly. Most of us cannot scout 600 players, and so figuring out which players you will scout (especially guys who will be going Day 3) can be a challenge. I aim to help solve this problem here with what basically amounts to a personal discovery queue.
Enhanced CPU draft ability - One of the common features across all draft sites, including this one, is that the CPU is basically the same GM for everybody. It has a general set of weights, parameters, and priorities that are fundamentally independent of any team. This approach makes a lot of sense and is what allows things like our suggestion algorithm to work for any team you select. However, what a team should do and what a team will do are very different. The long-term goal here is to use more traditional machine learning (think random forest ensembles, convolutional neural nets, etc) to build team by team models. These models, hopefully, would allow MockingBoard to have a more realistic feel. As one example, most draft folks agree that the 49ers draft very differently than say, the Eagles. A generalized CPU will never take a 3rd round RB just because it's the 49ers, but a SF-specific draft model absolutely would. There are all sorts of complexities to deal with here (ex: the Mike Vrabel led Patriots do not draft remotely like the Bill Belichick Patriots), and we'll see how accurate I can make these models to teams, but this would be a dream come true if I could pull it off.

The Future of MockingBoard

While those are the main big updates I will be working on for the main MockingBoard site, I also want to discuss here today what my other plans are. There are a few big things, so let's go through things one by one here.

Fantasy Football

This is the big one. One of my original motivations with MockingBoard was a frustration with the current set of draft tools. The combination of paywalls, ads, and a UX that could be greatly improved to me were all problems I noticed and felt I could solve here. I see many of these same issues in fantasy football. However, the issues are deeper than that. All the major fantasy football platforms now either have completely sold out to gambling (Sleeper, Yahoo, ESPN) or literally are gambling platforms (Underdog, FanDuel, DraftKings). For the past two years now, I have found it increasingly impossible to just play fantasy football. Every lineup I set is suddenly a modal or banner ad to try and get me to place a bet on it. I have sensed this frustration among many. Quite a few friends have told me directly they stopped playing fantasy football because it basically became a glorified gambling terminal. When I was at the Draft in Pittsburgh, a crowd of well over 100K people all booed the Kalshi planes in unison. So what's the goal here?

Take gambling out of fantasy football. Remember 2016? Remember how easy and chill fantasy football was to play? I want to return to that.
Remind people that fantasy football is meant to be fun. Fantasy football has, like many things, become increasingly built for the most competitive audience. People ruthlessly optimize for winning, and many leagues are now just about being as intense as you can. This is tiring and is, to me, not in the spirit of fantasy football. Fantasy football, at its core, is a social activity to have fun with your friends doing. It should not be this thing that consumes countless hours and dollars in your life.
Fantasy Football is wacky. By nature, fantasy football is a goofy activity. I want to lean into this. Wacky drafts (the arcade modes here are a bit of a prototype), social tools, and awesome commissioner tooling. It's a lot easier to have fun with fantasy football when you aren't fighting the site to do it.
Community matters. - If you've done fantasy football, you've read one of the countless Rotoworld blurbs about players. They can be helpful. However, I frankly have always found I am way more willing to listen to friends and peers than a simple blurb. So, instead of using Rotoworld blurbs, I want to let MockingBoard users write and upvote their OWN blurbs, similar to scouting reports now.

I will be spending most of my summer working on this. My goal is to get a beta version out for the 2026 season with a full launch for 2027. The beta version will include:

Season-long and weekly leagues
Variety of draft formats (if they exist here, they can exist in fantasy)
Realtime game stat updates
Scoring audit logs
Base scoring formats of standard, 0.5 PPR, and full PPR
Blurbs written by the community

My goal is for the full version in 2027 to of course be much more refined across the board, but also include things like:

Best in class analytics in a variety of ways
More wacky modes
Elite non-prescriptive tooling to let you make the best decision, not tell you what decision to make
Fully customizable scoring settings

Now, one of the things I need to talk about here is pricing. This will not be free. I know that sucks to hear. However, I have also said from the start that my goal with this platform is for it to be self-sustaining, not some sort of profit extractor that exploits its own users. With that in mind, I am pleased to say that the per league cost will be... $1.00

You read that right. This is not per person, this is per league. So, for you potential commissioners out there, that means your 10 person season long league costs one whole dollar. That's it. Any pricing question can be answered here with one dollar. How much is a weekly league? One dollar. Season long league? One dollar. A league with a ton of modifiers and crazy additions? One dollar. Why one dollar? I am betting that people are willing to pay one dollar to get a full season of fantasy football with their friends that never puts a single ad in your face and never tries to make you gamble. The dollar is what keeps me able to support the naturally high volume of users that fantasy football brings with it. Side note, for you Pro subscribers, that $1 fee is waived.

The fantasy platform will not live on this website, and will instead have its own domain. This keeps things clean and streamlined. Look for more details closer to launch. Once again, beta is targeting a 2026 season release, with the full version in 2027.

Other Sports

MockingBoard has been and will always be a football first platform. If you made it this far, you just got done reading me going in depth about fantasy football. One area I have constantly gotten questions about is the potential expansion into other sports. This is a challenge, but certainly not impossible. I do have a league in mind for what to tackle next, and that league is the NBA. In terms of league and draft structure, it is the closest to the NFL of the four major sports. I don't have much detail for you here right now, I'll just mention that I am targeting an initial release for an NBA version of MockingBoard some time in 2028.

College Football

The advent of NIL has brought a ton of wrinkles to the college football landscape. I am old enough to remember the days where there were a couple transfers per year, and a transfer meant sitting out for a season. Now we get thousands per year and keeping track of it can be a nightmare. College football now much more closely resembles the NFL when it comes to things like contracts and free agency. While it is not exact, it is certainly similar. A CFB version of MockingBoard is something I have begun pre-development work on, and its main goal will be to find a way to tackle the transfer portal and high school recruiting and scouting. While I wish I could give more concrete detail, that's really all I have for you guys right now

Closing Thoughts

This was a long one today, and I really appreciate you if you got this far. If you did, congrats! You get to hear one more little tidbit. I am hoping, at some point this summer, I will be able to connect with the man who runs GrindTheMock and get his pretty insane data about mock drafts integrated into MockingBoard (with loads of attribution). Otherwise, that's going to be it from me. Have a great day and I will see you around!