During the draft, players are either deemed reaches or steals or simply the right pick at the right time. Ideally, if a team is truly drafting the players they consider to be the best available at any position, they should find themselves getting players who most analysts thought would have come off the board by then.
One popular way to find a reasonable idea of where a player ranks among the rest of the draft class is to collect a large sample size of ‘big boards’ or mock drafts and put together a consensus.
In those terms, the Raiders came out very favorable in their class according to Warren Sharp. With regard to comparing where the Raiders took a player versus where their average position in mock drafts, they had the fourth-best value class.
