With another NFL draft now in the history books, phones are ringing off the hooks at sports-talk radio stations everywhere, sports desks at daily newspapers across the country and right here at Pro Football Weekly. Tweets and texts are overloading data lines throughout cyberspace, with everyone asking the same questions: Who are the winners, and who are the losers? And the simple and most honest answer is: Nobody knows!

We take extreme pride here at PFW in the fact that we invented independent draft analysis, and no one has done it as thoroughly, in-depth or accurately as we have for over 40 years now. But once all the experts have done the best they can to tell you how good a kid might or might not be, there is nothing more we can do but let all the intangibles and fate join the facts we’ve previously presented and see these kids prove themselves on the football field. We can tell you who we think got the best or least value out of their picks, based on where players were chosen. But winners and losers? That’s at minimum 20 months down the road. Until we see how these players actually practice and play over at least two full seasons, who stays healthy and who doesn’t, which kids handle all the character questions that have been debated about them ad nauseam and who can’t, and how all the other intangibles play out, there is simply no way to predict how things will play out.

But accepting that this is no indication whatsoever of what kind of players these kids will be in two years, we can have some fun talking about the winners in the value game, which more often than not does tend to prove out who drafts well and who doesn’t.