Draft evaluation is an imperfect science. Actually, scratch that. It’s not even a science. A lot of it involves making hypotheses based on available data—projecting a college player’s potential for a successful NFL career based on his film and his measurements—but there’s a reason it’s often described as a crapshoot.
Because we’re dealing with human beings here, human beings who know that they have the autonomy to flip their own script, either positively or negatively. Players have the ability to transform their bodies, for example, to become something else that was not projected or accounted for. They may discover a new dedication that helps take their game to a next level that was not predicted.