I couldn’t help but chuckle. I was scrolling The Beast and saw, “Explore all 99 quarterbacks.”
Dane Brugler knows as well as anyone how many quarterbacks will be taken in April’s draft. It won’t be 99. Not close. The record is 25, set during the 17-round draft of 1976.
But The Beast can’t be contained, let alone by an arbitrary measurement like number of players drafted. After all, there are only 257 total picks in this year’s draft. The Beast has profiles on 2,700 prospects, hundreds of them exhaustively detailed. The name fits.
My colleague Chris Branch, who writes our flagship newsletter, The Pulse, shared the perfect guide to using it. What I wanted to do was highlight some of the archetypes you’ll find in The Beast.
The “Of Course This Guy Will Be an NFL Star.” Below are two sentences about athletes. One is me, an avid golfer struggling to break 100. The other is Ohio State safety Caleb Downs.
- Father was an engineer, VP at a steel factory and soccer coach. Mother was an emergency room nurse who played baseball once in elementary school. Brother is an actuary at an insurance startup who played high school football for a year and might not have caught a pass.
- Father was a running back in the NFL for seven years before retiring to coach. Brother is a receiver for the Colts. Uncle coached at Georgia. Other uncle was a 12-year NFL vet and two-time Pro Bowler (Dre Bly).
The odds were against me. As for Downs, younger brother of Josh, he became an elite NFL prospect and the No. 5 overall player in The Beast. He’s Dane’s highest-ranking safety of the past five years.
Downs seems to be just as sure a thing as Kyle Hamilton, who became a two-time first-team All-Pro before age 25.
The Former Longshot. Then there’s Akheem Mesidor, the fifth-highest-graded edge rusher. Given his journey, how the heck did he get to a first-/second-round grade?
- Mesidor, born and raised in Ottawa, Canada (shout out!), was one of eight children raised by a single mother juggling multiple jobs. Bless her.
- He was diagnosed with narcolepsy when he was younger and needed medication to stay awake in school. He played for six different teams in high school and almost quit football in 2017.
- He transferred to the United States in 2019, where he had 10 sacks, played offense and handled some kicking duties.
Mesidor is now one of the draft’s oldest players at 25 and has a master’s degree from Miami, where he played his sixth season of college football in 2025.
The Fastest Receiver. Brenen Thompson is a 5-foot-9, 164-pound receiver from Mississippi State with a third-round grade. I’d expect he goes earlier after posting a 4.26-second 40-yard dash time at the combine.
The Massive Lineman with Question Marks. Tackle Kadyn Proctor is 6-foot-7 and 352 pounds, a three-year starter at Alabama and still only 20 years old. He also graduated near the top of his class and was a 2025 first-team Academic All-American.
The obvious potential is why Dane gave Proctor an early grade. The problem is … I’m not sure how good he is at football. Weaknesses include poor hands, timing and use of leverage. Pass.
We’ll have so much more from The Beast over the next few weeks. Until then, you can find it here:
Next: Dexter Lawrence demands a trade and Zak Keefer takes us inside Jon Gruden’s disastrous years with the Raiders.
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Giants star wants out
Earlier this week, nose tackle Dexter Lawrence requested a trade from the Giants. He then skipped the team’s offseason workouts, which began Tuesday.
Not ideal for new coach John Harbaugh, who called Lawrence “a cornerstone football player.” Lawrence has been exactly that since the Giants drafted him in 2019’s first round, becoming New York’s most productive homegrown talent across the past seven years. Since 2019, he is:
- The only Giants draftee to make multiple Pro Bowls. He leads the team in games played, defensive snaps, sacks, pressures and tackles for a loss.
- The team leader in Pro Football Reference’s Approximate Value metric, which measures a player’s impact on his team via a mix of team success and individual statistics.
Bad news: Losing him would be devastating. The star tackle is invaluable on the interior of this line, which is otherwise thin. He’s one of the best run defenders for a defense that allowed the most yards per carry in 2025. Harbaugh rightfully called Lawrence a “need.”
Good news: Keeping him sounds simple. He wants two things: a raise and guarantees. Lawrence has no guaranteed money remaining on the four-year, $90 million deal he signed in 2023. That average per year pay (APY) also ranks 12th among interior linemen.
(Note: Ages listed are how old players will be during the 2026 season.)
As Dan Duggan wrote in his story on this subject, one question is at the heart of the Giants’ decision:
💬 “Was last season’s underperformance the start of a decline for the 28-year-old or an outlier for a player who had established himself as the best interior defensive lineman in the NFL?”
Lawrence finished 2025 with just half a sack, 31 tackles and eight quarterback hits — all career lows. That said, he played through a lingering elbow injury, and was double-teamed at the second-highest rate in the NFL last season, per NextGen Stats.
It’s not an easy decision, one that largely depends on how much Lawrence is looking for. Dan also noted that the timing of this request — weeks after other teams handed out pricey contracts in free agency — hints at Lawrence’s intention to remain in New York. Plenty more details here. As for some juicy details …
Gruden’s Raiders: ‘We got nobody left’
Murphy’s Law is usually described as something like: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” That could also be the unofficial motto of the second Jon Gruden era with the Raiders.
It took Mark Davis six years — and a 10-year, $100 million contract —to convince Gruden to return in 2018. The coach didn’t make it through his fourth year. By that time:
- Gruden had shipped off the Raiders’ two most promising young stars, a 27-year-old Khalil Mack and a 24-year-old Amari Cooper.
- Thanks to those deals, the Raiders had four picks in top 40 of the 2019 draft and two first-rounders in 2020. Finally! A chance to rebuild the foundation!
- Only one of those players — running back Josh Jacobs — signed a second contract with the team (and he quickly moved on after that one-year extension).
- Then there’s the Antonio Brown saga. Gruden’s rebuild included shipping Pittsburgh multiple picks for Brown, whom they gave a three-year, $50 million contract with $30 million guaranteed. At the time, Gruden even put Brown above Jerry Rice as the hardest-working player he had ever seen practice.
For any Raiders fans who’d wanted to enjoy their day, sorry. Also, maybe skip the next sentence. My colleague Zak Keefer has much more in the full story here.
Extra Points
👀 Proper WR rankings. Typical pre-draft rankings group receivers together. Our film guru Ted Nguyen took a different approach, ranking receivers based on position type.
🔋 Energy levels are different in Baltimore, where the Ravens are embracing new coach Jesse Minter. “We’re all excited to start over. It’s a new energy,” said receiver Zay Flowers.
👎 Replacement refs could start officiating practices as soon as June 1, which suggests the league isn’t close to a deal with the referees’ union. Replacement officials would be hired primarily from the NCAA.
🧰 New-look 49ers? Vic Tafur explains why San Francisco’s typical approach to the draft — almost exclusively defensive linemen and receivers in the first round — should probably change this year.
▶️ Monday’s most-clicked: Bruce Feldman’s story on the draft’s most explosive prospect, who is yet to play a snap of live football. You read that right.
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