About Us
Draft Board Insider came about courtesy of 3 likeminded guys dotted all over the US, united by a love of Football. The website was founded by John Clifford, Mark Mitchell and Curtis Popejoy with a little help from a couple of other guys who seem to have vanished off the face of the earth. After the best part of year being reduced to blog status we came to a hurried decision to get something going before the April 2009 draft. This is the result. We've added one foreigner to help us out with the technical side and chip in with the odd article but for the most part it's back to "normal".
The Founding Fathers
Curtis Popejoy - is the co-founder and scouting director of Draftboardinsider.com. He has been
breaking down games and analyzing draft prospects for nearly 20 years with his
work being online since 2000.
Curt has been featured in print
and on radio on various media outlets across the country including ESPNradio.
Curt devotes Hundreds of hours a year evaluating prospects for website. He
looks at prospects with a critical but realistic eye choosing to give readers an
understanding of the player without boring them with cliche'. There is no
offseason and the work done goes 12 months a year.
This amount of time
commitment and dedication has allowed Curt to publish one of the more accurate
mock drafts available, and particularly his top 100 prospects is among the very
top of all published. Curt is a proud member of the Football Writers
Association of America, and pushes himself every year to provide the most
informative, accurate and entertaining product he can.
Curt Popejoy is available for
interviews and scouting reports and can be reached via email at curt@draftboardinsider.com
Mark Mitchell - Mark remains a man of mystery. A New Mexico resident, Mark has lived happily since 1947 on a small ranch just outside Roswell. He lists amongst his likes, Sci-Fi, experimental flight, cattle mutilation and the collected works of Burt Bacharach. Dislikes? David Duchovny, tourists and smokers. Where does stalking NFL Cheerleaders fit on this list? We're not quite sure... Mark Mitchell is available for interviews and can be reached via email at mark@draftboardinsider.com
John Clifford - John is a self-proclaimed genius. Among his accomplishments too many to name,
becoming a Steelers fan the morning of Super Bowl X. Later, ignoring his teacher's
instructions, he solved the Rubik's Cube during his 7th grade math class in
1:14 (that's minutes and seconds by the way); shortly thereafter he began selling a self-published solution guide in the
fall of 1980 - well ahead of that mania's curve.
Likewise, motivated
mostly by a desire to vacation in the south in the dead of winter, catch
some college football, eat a grotesque amount of wings, and support a few
of Mobile's finest entertainment hot spots, John hatched the cockamamy
of this website and coverage of the Senior Bowl as a central part of it
years before NFL Network and Under Armour would jump on the bandwagon with
week long televised practices (think - ahead of the curve). Speaking of which... Didn't vote Obama. 'Nuff said.
John can be contacted via email at jc@draftboardinsider.com
The Others
Ben Morgan - A welshman exiled to New Zealand. Ah New Zealand, it lies in the South Pacific 16 hours in the future yet 20 years in the past. Think "Lost" then add Rugby and sheep. There is no truth to the rumour that Ben is a Hobbit, despite the hairy feet. He did however, stunt double for King Kong. He's never going near a tall building again. Ben mostly provides technical knowhow (read nerdiness) and developed the various scripts which run DBI. You might also see his name crop up on the odd article or 12. You'll be able to spot them, they're the ones that go into far too much detail. You may also notice they never use 'izes' but only 'ises' and there's far too many u's in words. Don't give him a hard time, he's British and is likely to remind you "what's the name of the language again?"
Ben can be contacted via email on ben@draftboardinsider.com
