As soon as one NFL draft ends, we're all looking forward to the next. And while every fan wants to have hope for his or her favorite team going into a new season, that hope takes a bit of a hit if you see your team forecast with a top-10 draft pick.
With the 2021 NFL draft in the rearview mirror, we wanted to go through the teams we currently have projected with the top 10 picks in the 2022 draft, and explain a little bit about those predictions. The projections are created by forecasting a range of possibilities for each team's offense, defense and special teams based on numerous factors, including personnel changes, three-year performance, standard regression toward the mean and schedule strength.
If your favorite team is listed here, don't fret. Over the past three seasons, seven of the teams we projected to have top-10 draft picks instead ended up making the playoffs. There's a lot of year-to-year change in the NFL, and prognostication is difficult. For each team, we've listed a best-case scenario of what would take our prediction of a top-10 draft pick and turn it into a playoff season.
Here are our projections for the top 10 picks of the 2022 NFL draft:
