Projection is the hard part
Every pick is a forecast about how a young player will cope with faster opponents, a harder scheme and a professional workload, made largely on evidence gathered against different competition. Even a perfect evaluation of what someone has already done leaves the forecast open, and forecasts about people in their early twenties are famously unreliable.
Add fit — the same player will look outstanding in one scheme and lost in another — and the outcome depends on decisions the drafting team has not made yet, by coaches who may not be there in two years.
Why the coverage sounds so sure
There are months to fill and an audience that wants answers, and uncertainty does not hold attention. So a genuinely open question — is this player likely to be good? — gets converted into rankings, grades and comparisons that imply a precision nobody has. The format demands confidence, and confidence is supplied.
I do not blame anyone for that; it is an entertaining tradition and I enjoy it. I would just like the tone to survive contact with the results, and it rarely does, because by the time the results arrive the same voices are grading the next class.
How to judge a class honestly
Wait. Three seasons is roughly the point where you can see whether a pick became a contributor, and even then the answer is entangled with coaching and health. A team that hits on half its picks over several years is doing exceptionally well, which tells you what the base rate looks like.
The practical consequence is to be gentler with teams that miss and less impressed by teams that hit once. Process is the only thing that can be judged in the moment, and process means acknowledging the uncertainty rather than performing certainty about it.