There weren't many things that pre-2015 NFL Draft prognosticators agreed upon, but defensive lineman Leonard Williams' status as the de facto "best player available" was one of the few notions which seemed to garner little in the way of divisiveness.
Williams, a big, uber-athletic marvel who absolutely tore it up along the defensive line at USC, was widely expected to be one of the top few picks in late April.
A surprise fall out of the Top-5 had many pundits revisiting Williams' tape now that he's a member of the New York Jets, but looking back, it seems that the media may have simply been misinformed where Williams was concerned.
"In the leadup to the 2015 NFL Draft, it was common place to see Williams projected to go off the board with the second-overall pick to the Tennessee Titans," writes Charlie Campbell of WalterFootball.com. "Many media pundits labeled Williams as the best player in the 2015 NFL Draft, but they failed to sample a range of NFL teams to see if they were projecting Williams atop their draft boards. WalterFootball.com spoke with a number of teams and none of them had Williams at the top of their draft board. They did not view him as a No. 1-overall talent like Jadeveon Clowney, Ndamukong Suh or Gerald McCoy. Said sources felt that Williams was definitely below those players and while they thought he was a good player worthy of going in the top 10, they weren't completely blown away by his tape."
Williams was said to suffer from technical issues and a propensity to take plays off, but his prodigious physical gifts were thought to overrule those concerns.
Once the draft began and the Buccaneers made their expected selection of Jameis Winston at No. 1 and the Titans went with Marcus Mariota at No. 2, the question then became would the Jacksonville Jaguars and Gus Bradley snatch up Williams?
"Sources with the Jaguars said that Williams ended up being their backup," writes Campbell. "They entered the week of the 2015 NFL Draft with three finalists of Dante Fowler Jr., Leonard Williams and Amari Cooper. If Jacksonville had traded down, Andrus Peat was a player the organization really liked. In the last days before the 2015 NFL Draft, the Jaguars settled on Fowler. If he was somehow off the board before the third pick, they were going with Williams, but they liked Fowler more."
Fowler, an elite pass-rusher, tore his ACL one practice into his NFL career calling the selection into immediate question, but he's still got immense potential and will likely bounce back from the injury for the Jags.
After Jacksonville passed, the Raiders targeted quarterback help with Cooper and the Redskins at No. 5 did the same with offensive lineman Brandon Scherff, leaving the Jets to scoop up Williams.
The Jets were ironically, per Campbell, one of the few teams to actually view Williams in the same light as the pre-draft hype.
Now entering a crowded field at defensive end for New York, Williams has his work cut out for him to make an immediate impact - of course, the longer Muhammad Wilkerson stays away, the better chance Williams has to leave an impression on Jets coaches and earn some regular season snaps.
If he can slot in alongside the rest of the vaunted Jets front-seven and make some noise, concern over his pre-draft standing amongst the rest of the league's 31 teams will quickly fade.
