You can’t properly grade an NFL Draft, if that’s something you’re even interested in doing, until two, three, or even four years after it happens. Unless a class is wildly and immediately successful or a spectacular failure right out of the gate, grades are just a reflection of how fans, analysts, and the like feel in the immediate aftermath of the draft. Often, those grades are reflective of how a team does versus expectations.
By that metric, the Falcons were disappointing. I’ll write more about this later, but few teams strayed further from consensus than Atlanta, and that led to most of their picks being considered reaches by analysts.