By Jacob Camenker
Publication Date: 2026-03-20 10:04:00
March 20, 2026, 6:04 a.m. ET
A month and a half after the Microsoft Copilot AI chatbot crafted a reasonable and well-constructed 2026 NFL mock draft, USA TODAY Sports decided to retry the experiment.
The main takeaway? NFL mock draft analysts won’t need to worry about AI taking their jobs any time soon.
In the original experiment, Copilot successfully created a full, first-round mock in advance of Super Bowl 60 using just one prompt: “Can you create your own 2026 NFL mock draft for the first 32 picks?”
This time, Copilot struggled to interpret the prompt. This wasn’t a major surprise – as some Large Language Models (LLMs) have trouble keeping up with the latest sports news and updates – but the errors in this iteration were more unorthodox than usual.
Originally, the chatbot produced a mock draft that not only featured an incorrect draft order, but also consisted entirely of players the AI had seemingly created itself. After several re-prompts, Copilot was able to use the correct…
