Estimated reading time: 14 minutes
Every February, before the NFL Draft, before the NBA Draft, before the NHL Draft, before the MLB Draft, before the MLS SuperDraft (which sounds like a sandwich and is somehow a real thing), and probably before whatever draft they run for Professional Lacrosse, which I choose to believe involves a handshake and a coupon, the sports media complex cranks up its engines and produces something called the Mock Draft.
Thousands of them. From major outlets with graphics budgets and theme music. From guys named Tanner who run websites called DraftWire Underground and record their podcasts in a Kia Sorento parked outside a Panera. From algorithms trained on the fever dreams of men who believe they can predict the future by watching film of a 21-year-old run a 40-yard dash in shorts.
All of these people, with the absolute granite-faced confidence of someone defusing a nuclear device, tell you exactly which player will go to which team in an event that has not happened yet. They cite “league sources.” They use the phrase “fits the scheme.” They debate whether a pick is a “reach” or a “steal” with the intensity of Nuremberg prosecutors. This is mock draft culture at its purest and most deranged.
Then the actual draft happens, half of it goes sideways, and everyone just quietly resets for next year with zero accountability, zero shame, and somehow MORE podcasts.
It is, I want to be very clear, completely unhinged behavior.
And I love it. Not because it’s useful. Because it is the purest expression of the human need to feel like we know things when we absolutely, catastrophically, do not.
So I have decided to expand the format. There is an entire world of chaotic, unknowable, frequently catastrophic events out there that deserves this same fake draft analysis and weaponized confidence. I have assembled a panel of analysts who are exactly as qualified as the real ones, which is to say they have strong opinions and no consequences.
Let’s go to the board.
THE 2025 MOCK IRS SMALL BUSINESS AUDIT DRAFT
Pre-Draft Analysis
This is considered a historically deep class, and as any war room satire correspondent will tell you, the IRS draft board rewards patience and punishes hubris. Analysts have been tracking prospects all year and the consensus is that the IRS, despite budget pressures and a hiring freeze that somehow keeps not resulting in fewer audits, enters this draft with tremendous positional needs at the Suspicious Revenue tier, the Aggressive Deduction position, and what scouts are calling the “Sir That Is Not a Business” grouping, which has produced blue-chip selections for decades.
Our panel has been in the war room since January. The board is set. Let’s get into it.
Pick 1 Overall: Dave’s Landscaping, Tucson, Arizona
This is a no-brainer. Dave has been deducting his personal F-250 as a business vehicle since 2019. Last year he added his hot tub as a “client relaxation facility.” This year, sources indicate Dave attempted to write off a trip to Cabo as a “site assessment for a potential client” who was, upon further review, his brother-in-law Todd. The athleticism here is generational. The audacity is even better. The IRS takes Dave first overall and does not look back.
Pick 4 Overall: Moonbeam Wellness and Crystal Emporium, Asheville, North Carolina
A slight reach by position of need, but the film is undeniable. Moonbeam has been accepting payment in “energy exchanges” and reporting it as zero income. The owner recently deducted a healing drum circle as “continuing professional education.” One scout, Mel Hyper Jr., described her as “a can’t-miss prospect who has somehow missed every reporting requirement for four consecutive fiscal years.” Tremendous upside. The IRS trades up to get her.
Pick 9: The Freelance Writer
Controversial pick. Several analysts had freelancers going higher, citing the seventeen 1099s, the Venmo payments labeled “for the thing,” and the home office that is technically a couch. Others argued the IRS already has enough freelance writers and the position is overcrowded at the top. In the end, the sheer volume of contradictory income documentation pushes the freelance writer into the top ten. Our panel unanimously agrees this selection “just makes sense.”
Sleeper Alert: A small-town “life coach” who operates primarily through a Facebook group and accepts payment in gift cards is generating enormous buzz as a late-round steal. Skip Clueless, who has been tracking the life coach space all season, was blunt: “We don’t fully understand what she does, and neither does she, and that’s exactly what makes her so fascinating to us.”
THE ANNUAL MOCK NATURAL DISASTER DRAFT
Pre-Draft Analysis
Mother Nature enters this draft year with an unusually loaded board and what analysts are describing as “generational depth at multiple positions.” If you have spent any time following sports mock draft humor, you already know that the best pre-draft analysis is delivered with maximum confidence about things no one can actually predict. The natural disaster draft operates on exactly the same principle, with slightly higher stakes and significantly more wind speed. The panel notes that climate conditions have significantly elevated prospect ceilings across the board, and several historically mid-round picks are now legitimate first-round talents. It is a tremendous time to be a catastrophic weather event.
Pick 1 Overall: Gulf Coast Hurricane Season
Look. At some point, the Gulf Coast Hurricane Season has to stop being a surprise pick. It goes in the first round. It has gone in the first round every single year since people started keeping records, and before that, since people started losing houses. Our panel has Gulf Coast Hurricane as a consensus number one. A veteran scout named Rod McStay, who asked to remain anonymous because he lives in Tampa and is in denial, called it “the most complete disaster prospect I have seen in thirty years of scouting.” High floor, no ceiling, historically consistent. You take the Gulf Coast Hurricane first overall. You put up the sandbags. You do not act surprised.
Pick 7: California Wildfire
Down slightly from last year due to what the panel is calling “brand saturation,” but still an elite pick with tremendous range and an absolutely unacceptable amount of acreage. Scouts have noted that California Wildfire has become “a system player” in recent years, meaning it no longer needs ideal conditions to produce at a high level. It will figure it out. It always figures it out. Steven A. Yells described it as “the kind of prospect who doesn’t show up in the box score but completely changes the landscape,” which is technically accurate and also not a metaphor.
Pick 12: Midwest Tornado Outbreak
This is where the panel gets divisive. Half the scouts love the burst. The lateral movement is elite. The other half note the inconsistency issue, specifically that a Midwest Tornado can be a career-altering event one year and then just sort of a bad afternoon the next. Colin Cowbell put it bluntly: “Some years it’s an F5 that rearranges a zip code. Some years it’s a funnel cloud that knocks over a trampoline. You’re drafting the ceiling.” The panel ultimately takes Midwest Tornado at twelve and acknowledges they may be reaching.
Late Round Sleeper Alert: A February ice storm in a city with exactly three snowplows and a population that treats a quarter inch of accumulation as a civilizational threat. Low name recognition. Enormous production. Do not sleep on this pick. Several cities already did and regretted it.
Analyst Note on Climate Change: There is significant debate about whether Climate Change should be considered a prospect or a general manager. The panel has tabled this discussion until next quarter.
THE MOCK BODY’S ANNUAL APPROACHING-60 AILMENT DRAFT
Pre-Draft Analysis
I want to be upfront about something: this draft is personal. I am the team. I did not choose this franchise. I inherited it. The previous regime made a series of decisions in the 1980s and 1990s involving heavy metal concerts, recreational contact sports, and an extended period during which “stretching” was considered optional, and I am now dealing with a roster that reflects those choices at a granular and unpleasant level. What follows is the most painfully accurate satirical draft picks you will read today, and also possibly the most painfully accurate anything you will read today. The board is deep this year. Analysts are projecting a multi-round class with significant late-round contributions.
Pick 1 Overall: The Mystery Knee
Unanimous. The Mystery Knee has been the consensus number one for three consecutive years and shows no signs of losing its ranking. Nobody knows the origin story. There was no incident. There was no moment. It simply appeared one morning like an uninvited houseguest who has since made himself comfortable and shows no interest in leaving. The orthopedist used the phrase “some wear” with the energy of a man who has said “some wear” ten thousand times and made peace with it. The Mystery Knee goes first overall. All analysts agree. Nobody is happy.
Pick 3: The New Sleep Situation
This is a painful pick for a franchise that once slept eight hours and woke up feeling like a person. Sleep has fallen dramatically down the board following what scouts are calling “a fundamental restructuring of its operating model.” It now exits the building at 5am regardless of when it arrived, vanishes completely from 3 to 4am for reasons no one can identify, and has developed an adversarial relationship with the second half of the night. Sleep’s agent released a statement describing the situation as “a natural evolution.” The panel describes it as “an absolute betrayal.” The pick stands.
Pick 8: Unexplained Lower Back Thing
A classic boom-or-bust prospect. It appeared following an afternoon of clipping toenails. Not moving furniture. Not hauling lumber. Clipping toenails. In a chair. Like a person. It has never been formally diagnosed because scheduling an appointment requires energy that the lower back situation has specifically targeted and eliminated. It surfaces unpredictably when getting out of chairs, reaching for things on the second shelf, or doing absolutely nothing at all. Chad Schlepster called it “the most coachable injury I’ve ever seen, in that it cannot be coached under any circumstances.”
Compensatory Pick: The Thing with My Ear
A compensatory selection added after the panel noted this prospect has been on the board for two years and keeps getting deferred to “next year’s class.” It’s on the board now. The panel recommends addressing it before it becomes a first-round pick under circumstances no one will enjoy.
THE MOCK CONGRESSIONAL LOOPHOLE DRAFT
Pre-Draft Analysis
This draft operates differently than the others. There is no combine. There is no interview process. The prospects are not named anywhere in the bill. They are embedded inside 1,400-page documents with titles like “The American Prosperity and Infrastructure Modernization and Also Some Other Stuff Act,” and they are discovered approximately two years later by a journalist who then writes a very reasonable article that generates significant online outrage and zero legislative consequences. As a piece of draft board comedy, it essentially writes itself. It is a deep class. It is always a deep class.
Pick 2: The Thoroughbred Racehorse Depreciation Exemption
A perennial top pick. A war room staple. This loophole has been drafted in the first three rounds of every Congressional session since 1986, which either indicates tremendous sustained value or a process that has completely lost the ability to feel embarrassment. It benefits a group of people who own racehorses as a hobby and would like the government to treat this as a hardship. As Trey Louderman noted, “Scheme fit is perfect. The scheme, in this case, being the United States tax code.”
Pick 6: The Yacht Depreciation Amendment
Drafted by nobody whose name appears in the bill. Buck Baywatch called it “a masterpiece of abstraction.” Has been quietly producing returns for a population of people who use “summer” as a verb and consider this a reasonable situation.
Pick 11: The Vague Green Energy Credit That Technically Applies to Golf Carts
The steal of the draft. Buck Baywatch, apparently having forgotten he already weighed in, described it as “the legal equivalent of leaving a twenty in your brother-in-law’s pocket and asking him to find it later.” Several wealthy golf communities are already executing on this pick. They are doing so in carts. Quietly.
Late Round Darkhorse: An agricultural subsidy buried in an omnibus bill that applies specifically to a type of grain grown in three counties, two of which happen to be represented by the bill’s primary sponsor. Trip Shameless spent four months tracking this prospect and called it “the most elegant exploitation of pronoun ambiguity I have ever seen in domestic energy policy,” which is a sentence that should concern everyone. The panel notes this prospect “probably isn’t for everyone” and then immediately notes that it is, specifically, for everyone on a very short and non-public list.
THE MOCK FARM EQUIPMENT BREAKDOWN DRAFT
Pre-Draft Analysis
I want to acknowledge upfront that I have lived expertise here that no other analyst on this panel can match. I have been in the war room. The war room smells like diesel and bad news. The war room has a dirt floor and a cat named Vinny Van Meow sitting on the one piece of equipment that is currently functioning, directly on top of the part that will break next. I have seen things. I have the receipts. Literally. My accountant has a folder. This is not mock draft parody. This is biography.
Pick 1 Overall: The Tractor
It is always the tractor. The tractor is the LeBron James of farm equipment breakdowns in that it is the most talented, the most irreplaceable, the most catastrophically disruptive when it fails to perform, and it has an agent who controls the situation more than you do. The tractor breaks during peak season. Always. It does not break in January when you are inside watching football and have nowhere to be. It breaks at 7am on a Saturday in May when the field needs to be turned and the dealer is three counties over and operates on hours that suggest the concept of “business” is something they are still deciding whether to fully commit to. The tractor goes first overall every year. This is non-negotiable.
Pick 4: The Fence Section You Fixed Last Spring
Specifically the one you stood in front of, hands on hips, and said “that’ll hold.” Scouts have noted this prospect has elite timing. It fails precisely when something important is on the other side or, more commonly, on the wrong side. My dog, Professor Archibald Pickles, a five-pound Scandinavian Lintbøøl who should by every physical measure be incapable of generating consequences, is never on the correct side of any fence at any time and may constitute his own separate draft. The panel has him ranked as a system player who elevates everyone around him by making everything slightly worse in ways that are difficult to trace directly back to him.
Pick 8: The Water Line
A sleeper with terrifying upside. Appears without warning. Discovered by one of two methods: unexpected mud in a location where mud has no business being, or Trouble, my pig, who possesses an inexplicable sixth sense for locating problems that do not yet know they are problems. Trouble has discovered two water line issues, one fence post failure, and what turned out to be a concerning situation with the septic system, all before 8am on days when I had other plans. The panel has repeatedly tried to hire Trouble as a scout. Trouble is not interested.
Pick 13: The Sewage Pump Control Panel
Not a specific component. Not a specific wire. Just a panel that periodically displays a warning light that does not correspond to any problem anyone can identify, goes dark when the technician arrives, and returns the following Tuesday with a different light. The technician comes out, finds nothing wrong, charges a diagnostic fee, and leaves with the quiet confidence of a man who has somewhere else to be. This has happened four times. What it controls is the sewage pump, which means the stakes of ignoring it are uniquely and specifically terrible. The panel considers this pick “high floor, recurring revenue, and an unusually strong negotiating position.”
The Part Where It Gets Uncomfortable
Here is what I have been circling around this entire essay, because I am constitutionally incapable of writing something this long without eventually saying something I actually mean.
Mock drafts exist because we cannot look at the future directly.
The uncertainty is too much. The kid from Alabama might be a Hall of Famer or a career backup, and the difference lives in a ligament and a coaching staff and a thousand moments no scout will ever see. So we build the board. We run the combine. We cite the sources. We perform expertise because expertise feels like control and control feels like safety and safety is, in the end, the thing everyone is actually drafting for. The fake draft analysis feels real because we need it to.
We do not just do it in sports. We do it everywhere. We make predictions about our health and schedule the follow-up for three months out because we want to believe we are managing something rather than just living in it. We do five-year plans. We read the forecasts. We consult the models. We talk to the analysts. And the actual future shows up anyway, wearing a different number, going to a team nobody had on their board, available for reasons that make complete sense in retrospect and zero sense beforehand.
The mock draft is how we sit in the war room and pretend we have a board.
We are all just waiting to see who gets called.
The results are not published.
And Trouble the pig already knows anyway.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting foran agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
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