Carson Beck as QB3? A look at how NFL Draft's top positional stacks are shaping up before showtime

Big Boards: Consensus Top 75 • Nate Tice • Charles McDonald | Draft guide With the NFL Draft upon us, we finally get around to what we’ve known for months — and what we’ve debated for what has seemed like an eternity. Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza is going to be the first overall pick. And Alabama quarterback Ty Simpson is going to get drafted ...

well … somewhere. All secrets will be revealed by the end of Saturday night — at which point we can prematurely grade everyone’s performance and argue over which team stole the show or blew the entire draft. Before we do that, it’s worth breaking down how the top of positional stacks appear to have shaped up since the scouting combine in late March.

After spending almost two months talking to a swath of evaluators in preparation for this year’s All-Juice Team , I got a better understanding of how some teams and their talent evaluators have stacked up each position along the way. In the process, we can now give you what we believe is the order of the talent stack at the top of each position in the draft, based on evaluations of various personnel sources from 10 different teams. It’s not a perfect snapshot of all 32 franchises, and the information has been gathered during the height of the league’s lying season.

But broad commonalities emerged from the cross section of evaluators, offering a reasonable thumbnail of how the talent stacks are likely to unfold in this draft. Starting with quarterback, for example. Peering through the dustup over Simpson’s talent and where he should be ranked among his fellow quarterbacks — and tuning out and last-minute nonsensical second-guessing about Mendoza — at least three things emerged about the quarterbacks: First, Mendoza swept the board in the quarterback stack without much fanfare.