How I Actually Use Walter Football's Draft Resources Without Losing My Mind
Walter Football is one of those sites that most casual fans have never heard of, but anyone who has spent serious time on draft prep knows exactly what it is. It is a straightforward analytics and prospect evaluation platform built around one person, Mike Renner, and a small team that has been doing this longer than most NFL teams have had stable front offices. The 2023 draft guide they put out was not flashier than previous years, but it was actually more useful because they stopped trying to pretend the draft was a science and leaned into the one thing they do well: raw prospect data organized into something you can actually use. What you are getting when you pull up their 2023 guide is a set of prospect profiles, positional rankings, mock draft boards, and their proprietary grade system. There is nothing magical about it. The site has been structured the same way for over a decade. What changed in 2023 was mostly the depth of their coverage of the late-round backs and the international pipeline, which they had started tracking more seriously a couple years prior but really expanded for that draft cycle. The way it works in practice is simple. You go to their prospect page, you pick a positional group, you scroll through their ranked lists, and each player has a page with a letter grade, a summary, strengths, weaknesses, and a comp. That is basically it. The grades themselves range from A+ down to D, and the letter system is not new to anyone who has watched football since the nineties. What trips people up is they treat the grades like gospel instead of what they actually are: a single person's opinion backed by film study and measurable data.
I remember working through the 2023 class last year and hitting a wall with the intermediate tight ends. Walter had them ranked in a way that did not match what I was seeing on tape from any of the major combine routes. I spent about forty-five minutes cross-referencing their grades against the actual game film from the Senior Bowl and pro day workouts, and I found that their system had overweighted route tree complexity for players who had mostly run shallow crossers and seam routes at school. The workaround was to ignore the overall grade for that position group and just look at the individual skill breakdowns they post, which are more granular than the letter grade suggests. If you skip past the headline number, the actual data underneath is pretty solid. The site also runs a weekly mock draft that gets updated throughout the year. This is where a lot of people get stuck, because they assume the mock is prediction instead of what it actually is, which is a living document that reflects the writer's current best guess based on available information. The 2023 mock went through roughly fourteen revisions between January and April, and if you track the revision history, you can see exactly which prospects moved and why. That revision trail is probably the single most underused piece of information on the entire site. One thing beginners consistently miss is that the combine scores and pro day numbers on Walter Football are not always the official combine results. Sometimes they carry pro day numbers when the player did not run at the combine, and in a few cases they list unofficial times that the player ran at their pro day or private workout. I learned this the hard way during the 2023 prep when I pulled what I thought was an official forty time for a second round corner and it turned out to be a hand-timed pro day number. It looked like a thirty eight five but was closer to a four oh two by any standard timing. I had to correct a lot of internal research notes after that.
The site also posts a board system where you can sort by position, by round likelihood, and by overall grade. This is useful if you are building your own draft board, but the sorting function is not as reliable as it should be. I have seen players display in the wrong round bucket on a couple occasions, usually because their draft stock changed between when the data was entered and when you are looking at it. Always double check the actual prospect page instead of trusting the board filter alone. There is no download option for the full 2023 draft guide because Walter Football does not package their content that way. Everything is browser based and updates in real time. If you want to save copies of specific pages, you have to use your browser's print to PDF function or manually screenshot what you need. This is a minor inconvenience but it is something to be aware of if you are trying to build a personal reference library before the draft starts. The biggest limitation of Walter Football as a resource is that it is fundamentally one perspective. Mike Renner is talented and he has been doing this for a very long time, but his process is not the same as anyone else's. His grading methodology tends to weight college production and physical measurables higher than most NFL evaluators do. This means he is more likely to reach for prospects with strong college numbers who may have been surrounded by better systems or talent, and he is occasionally too low on players whose profile is harder to quantify from film alone, like special teams contributors or players with extensive injury histories.
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If you are looking for a counterbalance, I usually pair Walter with the Beyer Bros for their more film-first approach and then cross reference with Pro Football Focus grade trends from the previous season. No single source is enough. Walter is strong on raw data organization and prospect summaries, weaker on situational and scheme fit analysis, and the 2023 guide is no different from their usual output in that regard. It is a solid reference, not a final answer. The one area where Walter Football actually surprised me in 2023 was their international prospect tracking. They added profiles for players from the CFL and U Sports that were not well covered elsewhere, and a few of those picks ended up on actual roster spots. If you are willing to spend the time going through those less familiar pages, there is free value in there that most people skip over because they only look at the main college rankings. I do not use Walter Football anymore the way I used to. The site itself has gotten slower, the ad load has increased, and some of the older draft classes are not updated as frequently as they should be. But for a quick positional deep dive on the 2023 class, it still works fine if you read past the grades and actually look at the supporting material they provide. Just do not treat any single number on that site as truth. It is one opinion, filed neatly, and that is all it ever was supposed to be.
