Everyone has a mock draft these days, and as always there isn’t much agreement on what the New Orleans Saints will do in the upcoming 2022 NFL draft. Troublingly, in the latest mock draft from Peter King over at NBC Sports, things took a turn for the worse. King predicts a run on wide receivers in the first round, which is widely anticipated; but he sees it kicking off much sooner than other projections, leaving the Saints on the outside looking in. In a dark twist of irony, a lot of the things that broke New Orleans’ way in our staff-wide collaborative mock draft instead went sideways in King’s predictions.
2022 draft prospects Drake London, Garrett Wilson, Jameson Williams, and Chris Olave all go off the board before New Orleans gets on the clock at No. 16. Sure, the Saints do still get a good receiver, but they ended up with the fifth-ranked prospect at their greatest position of need: Arkansas product Treylon Burks. This isn’t a knock on Burks — the nightmare scenario here isn’t the Saints getting stuck with Burks specifically or something like that. He’s a good football player and should thrive in the right role in the NFL, should the Saints continue to let him do what he does best on screens while developing the skills to expand his route tree.
Instead, the issue is more about the Saints positioning themselves to hopefully draft one of the two or three best receivers in this year’s class but ending up without them, which is what happened in King’s mock draft. But, hey, maybe Burks is the top-rated receiver on New Orleans’ big board (he’s ranked sixth at the position on ours). If they want to give Jameis Winston another big-bodied weapon to pair with Michael Thomas, he fits the bill. Here’s what King wrote of the match:
