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Over the last few years, we've developed a Niners Nation Big Board to help us get prepared for the NFL Draft. It's not a perfect system, but it allows people to vote on the players they think best fit in to what the 49ers need. We use a voting system created by Chris Pokorny from Dawgs By Nature, which allows people to rank out their top five on a given topic. It gives points in descending order of the vote, so the player you rank #1 gets 5 points, and the player you rank #5 gets 1 point.
The 2014 NFL Draft was bumped back a couple weeks into May, so I've held off creating the big board thus far. However, yesterday, reedkrase dropped in a request for it, and with the bulk of free agency finished, I figured why not get started?
I liked some of reedkrase's suggestions, and so I figured we would start off with a rundown of positional needs. We'll sort through the needs, and use that to figure out which players we'll include in the early voting. We'll grab the players from Poldarn's consensus Big Board. The poll below says "players" in certain areas, but that's simply the html set-up. This was meant for player votes, and we're just gaming it a little bit for the needs vote.
For now, pick your top five positions of need heading into the draft. Just to clarify, I decided to split up defensive line into two listings. One is defensive end/tackle and one is nose tackle. In reality, I probably could have just said defensive line and been done with it, but I'll go with this. If you're looking at guys that could potentially replace Justin Smith or Ray McDonald, and have versatility, go with defensive end/tackle. If you are thinking the team needs to grab a big guy that will be almost exclusively a nose tackle, go with nose tackle.
I'm going to leave this poll open for at least two or three days, just to get a nice balance of votes. Once we get through that, we'll move on to the players. When we switch to the players, the way it works is I'll post 25 players. We'll vote and come up with spots 1 through 5. After that, we'll remove those five names, and add five more, then vote for spots 6 through 10. That will continue on, although I'm not entirely sure how far down we'll go.