Round 1 of Dynasty Rookie Drafts Just Got a Whole Lot Worse . . . and Better

**Ben Gretch** (0:10)
Reacting to round one of the NFL Draft, that's what we're doing today on Stealing Bananas. I'm Ben Gretch, and you can find the Stealing Signals newsletter at bengretch.subzac.com. With me, as always, is Shawn Siegele. You can find all of his great work at RotoViz, including just this week before round one, a really fun breakdown. 2026 NFL Cheat Sheet Advanced Stat Profiles and Tiered Rankings of the Top 40 Prospects. That's the name. You went through the Top 40 and ranked them in a rookie draft sense. Then you always take this and edit it after we get the landing spots. You talk through your whole process in there.
But great stuff on all the most important prospects. In the Top 40, you're getting, especially in this class, you're getting a lot of names that you probably don't even have to care about. You get to about 15 and you get to the names that don't really matter anymore. Unfortunately, with this class, that's not true. But I'm exaggerating a little bit. But it is a little bit of a shame.

**Shawn Siegele** (1:12)
But I think this class is a little bit fun in that, the round that is so bad is the one that we usually really like and try and stockpile picks in. But if you're talking about a rookie draft, round two is terrible. I mean, terrible, terrible. I think that the back of round three and the beginning of round four might be kind of fun and might be sort of similar to, because one of the things here, and obviously we know that the vast majority of these players don't matter, but I mean, this is a freakishly athletic wide receiver class.
So the thing that's kind of fun about it is that, like in any draft, you have the two or three guys who can play football, and then you've got the players that people are still interested in because these guys are great athletes and you're like, yeah, but it's not a track and field contest. They'll say, yeah, but, right, because what if they learn to play a little bit? I mean, once you run out of people who can actually play, which you do very early, it is kind of exciting to see just how athletic these guys are. I mean, they're very, very athletic.

**Ben Gretch** (2:13)
So I was writing about the class a little bit over at the newsletter before the draft as well, and one of the macro takes, initially when everyone said, this is a really bad class, I was like, well, there may still be some diamonds in the rough, and then we'll think about that too. And I'm like, well, I mean, a lot of guys get pushed up. Like when I was looking through your piece, some of the guys you have, like just outside the first round of rookie drafts, like at 13 and 14 and stuff, I'm like, these guys would normally go like the two, three turn. Like that's what their profiles are. You'd usually get a little bit of a better discount on them.

**Shawn Siegele** (2:41)
Like underwhelming running backs.

**Ben Gretch** (2:43)
Yeah. And Trey Lance's brother you had in there, Bryce Lance, and he's like, he's a super athletic but unproductive small school guy. Like you can get, that was like the Chase Claypool thing or whatever, and you're taking him in like the early third round. Claypool wasn't a small school guy, but sort of the same concept where you're usually telling us these like early third round wide receivers, you want them to have some type of defining trait, whether that's really great production or really great athleticism, it can kind of go both ways. But I always thought of that as like third round guys, not, you know, you have them ranked 14th. And it's like, this is not, this is an underwhelming 14th ranked player.
But anyway, all that stuff.

**Shawn Siegele** (3:21)
Well, once we get to the second and third rounds, some of those guys will at least be a little bit interesting because we'll find out that the NFL maybe likes them as much as the Seattle Seahawks liked Darian Price.

**Ben Gretch** (3:32)
Right. The thing that I, that I, the macro thing I was going to say about the class as a whole as it relates to all that stuff is, if you, like I was saying, well, probably there's not, it's a little harder to find diamonds in the rough if even some of these guys get pushed up. But maybe there's some depth is interesting. Maybe there really is some depth into the late round three and those things, like you said. And some of the diamonds in the rough would be diamonds in the rough in any class. It doesn't matter how, like Pukunakua wouldn't have been pushed way up in this class. His profile was underrated for reasons that would have remained underrated. He was a day three pick and all of that stuff.