After a sizzling NFL Combine performance we should have known the St. Louis Rams' most consistent 2011 NFL Mock Draft choice, Julio Jones, would prove a little too good to be true. But it seems now, from looking at WalterFootball.com's "2011 NFL Draft consensus", that he's even too-good-er than we thought. A.J. Green remains the top wide receiver, the consensus second-best player in the draft, but Julio Jones is eighth on this collection of big boards—this even-bigger-board, I guess.
Of course, if you're an especially optimistic type, there's still room for it with news like this. It just goes to show, after all, how inexact an art mock drafting is—and how draft-position so frequently diverges from actual measurements of talent. Jones, after all, is five spots higher on this list than Blaine Gabbert, who's extremely likely to go earlier; Patrick Peterson, the LSU cornerback, is the highest player on the board, mainly because nobody's especially negative on him, while Gabbert, unranked in Wes Bunting's estimation, suffers for that lack of certainty.
Jones has a wide variance of his own—Bunting ranks him third, while Tony Pauline, of Sports Illustrated, drops him all the way to 17th.