Welcome to the new (and very improved) Mocking the Draft

Hello fellow draftaholics! Welcome to the NFL's true "second season," a season where we all huddle around our PCs, laptops, and Macs, searching every website possible for information on college players who have decided to enter the 2009 NFL Draft. In many ways, the NFL Draft almost exceeds the Super Bowl in terms of fan interest and excitement. For many, the draft means hope. Look no further than the two 2009 Super Bowl participants. Two years ago, both these teams were out of the playoffs. Now, they are playing for a championship.

A big reason for their recent success is the NFL Draft.

Because of your demand for more and more information on players and NFL Draft coverage, we at SB Nation are very excited to re-introduce you to the new Mocking the Draft, SB Nation's new-NEW NFL Draft blog. We are also happy to introduce MTD's new lead scout and head writer, Mocking Dan.

Mocking Dan takes over for Matt Miller, who is still working his draft magic over at New Era Scouting. While we miss Matt and wish him all the best, Mocking Dan brings to MTD and SB Nation a strong knowledge of draft prospects and a keen eye for evaluating talent. We are very excited to have him on board, and as you can see, he is already blogging up a storm.

Under Mocking Dan's direction, we have also assigned five contributing writers to the site. These writers will cover specific NFL divisions (and the teams in those divisions) leading up to the April draft. These writers may look familiar to many of you. They have been contributing to several of our current NFL team blogs, like Mile High Report and Stampede Blue. Like Mocking Dan, we are ecstatic these talented and hard-working writers have taken on these writing duties by covering these teams and their draft needs. The writers and their respective NFL division beats are:

• hoosierteacher- AFC East and AFC South
• shake n bake- AFC North
• Styg50- AFC West and NFC West
• BigBlueShoe (me!)- NFC East
• mgrex03- NFC North and NFC South

These NFL division writers will cover the draft needs of the teams in their respective divisions using scouting reports, insight, and other information from Mocking Dan, our NFL blog community, and readers like YOU! We will also have a site Mock Draft with writers offering their picks for their teams. Mocking Dan will post his mock drafts as often as possible.

We will also offer coverage of the various college pro days, the NFL Combine in Indianapolis, and (of course) the 2009 NFL Draft itself from Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

We hope you love our new format, using SB Nation's 2.0 blogging platform. We will also implement more navigation features here at MTD, making it easier for you to get player information and scouting reports based on position and ranking. As always, we look forward to your comments on our draft coverage. So, on behalf of the SB Nation NFL community, welcome to the Nation!

Take a moment to welcome Mocking Dan and his merry band of contributing writers. We hope you enjoy and contribute to the new-NEW Mocking the Draft! For a quick taste of Mocking Dan's first mock draft:

1. Detroit Lions
	Matt Stafford, QB, Georgia: With five picks in the first three rounds, the Lions can take Stafford with the No. 1 pick and build the line later in the draft. Starting offensive tackles are much more readily available in this draft than quarterbacks, so Detroit can still pick up a tackle later.

For more, click here and comment away.