You can almost feel football in the air again. Teams are away after the conclusion of mandatory minicamps around the NFL, but the anticipation for the 2024 college football and NFL seasons will be ramping up over the next couple of weeks which means talk about the 2025 NFL Draft is going to continue to ramp up. The ink may still be drying on the 2024 NFL Draft, but it’s never too early to get a pulse on the next wave of potential NFL stars, and our latest 2025 NFL mock draft is here to do exactly that.
For the order of this 2025 NFL mock draft, we used our recent 2024 NFL Power Rankings and overall record predictions for the season. Don't get too offended or hung up on that because it's going to change significantly over the course of the year.
2025 NFL Mock Draft: Raiders land new franchise quarterback
1. Las Vegas Raiders: Carson Beck, QB, Georgia
Raiders fans are going to come after me for this, but someone’s got to be projected in the 1st overall slot of next year’s draft. The Raiders have arguably the worst quarterback situation in the league (as much as we love Gardner Minshew) and they hired last year’s interim head coach Antonio Pierce in a full-time role.
Those two factors don’t necessarily mean the Raiders are going to be bad this year. The team did quite well with Antonio Pierce and Gardner Minshew was on a Colts team that won nine games and narrowly missed the playoffs last year. But are the Raiders going to have the same wind in their sails this year that we saw last year after Josh McDaniels was fired?
2. Washington Commanders: James Pearce Jr., EDGE, Tennessee
The Washington Commanders had the second overall pick in this year’s draft as well and they landed Heisman Trophy winner Jayden Daniels to finally put a possible star in place as the franchise quarterback. There’s certainly a lot of “new” going on this year with Dan Quinn taking over as Washington’s head coach, Kliff Kingsbury coaching the offense, a new quarterback, etc. It’s a transitional year and I wouldn’t be shocked if Washington was picking 1st or 2nd next year at all.
Here, they land arguably the top defensive player in a loaded defensive draft class. James Pearce Jr. can be a game wrecker off the edge for Dan Quinn and give the Commanders a legitimate pair of franchise cornerstones on either side of the ball. Right now, the Commanders have a bunch of rotational guys coming off the edge.