Five Key Michigan Football Questions Ahead Of The NFL Draft

The first round of the 2021 NFL Draft begins Thursday night, with rounds two and three set to take place Friday evening and the final four rounds slated for Saturday afternoon.

There are 11 draft-eligible former Michigan Wolverines hoping to hear their names called this weekend, creating the possibility for yet another Maize and Blue-filled draft.

Here are five key questions heading into the draft, including on how high and how many Wolverines will picked, who some potential sleepers could be and more.

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Michigan has had a player selected in the first round in three of the last four NFL Drafts, and it appears that the trend will continue in 2021. Edge defender Kwity Paye has the best chance — by far — to be chosen on Thursday, though it's not entirely impossible that Michigan could see multiple players picked on day one (more on some of those candidates below).

It's typical that a defensive end or 'edge' defender will be chosen extremely early in the draft, with a player labeled as one of those positions having been selected within the first five picks in each of the last five drafts. But it doesn't look like that will be the case this year.

Paye is considered by many to be the top edge defender heading in, but he's slated as a likely mid-to-late-first-round selection.

"Paye has the kind of physical tools that don’t come around every class," wrote PFF's Michael Renner, who agrees that Paye is the best edge out of the crop at his position. "Whether it’s the sub-6.5-second three-cone he ran as a junior or the 36 bench press reps he did at his pro day, Paye is the definition of 'built different.' This season we finally saw him start to put it all together, as his 87.1 pass-rushing grade suggests."

Paye is about to see his dreams of playing in the NFL become a reality. His inspirational story was recently chronicled by ESPN.com in a piece that labeled him the NFL Draft's 'most extraordinary prospect,' because of his journey that included making it out of a refugee camp in Sierra Leone to come to America and being raised by a single mother, who made much of his path to stardom possible after escaping a war-torn Liberia.

His story is about to be told again on the national stage, and we're not alone in being willing to be that it will be Thursday night.

If Paye does indeed go as highly as he's projected to, all signs here point to offensive lineman Jalen Mayfield, who projects as a tackle that also has the ability to play guard. The Grand Rapids, Mich., native garnered plenty of first-round buzz heading into the 2020 season, but after missing most of the shortened campaign with an injury, he is now widely viewed as a second-round choice.

However, there is still a possibility that he gets snatched up in the first round. NFL.com analyst Maurice Jones-Drew actually has Mayfield getting taken at No. 19 overall to the Denver Broncos, who would have to trade down from No. 9 to secure him at that spot (the Washington Football Team currently owns No. 19). He has Mayfield going ahead of Paye and as the first Wolverine off the board.

"The Broncos already have the weapons around [quarterback] Drew Lock," Jones-Drew wrote. "Now they draft Mayfield to give them two bookend tackles, having locked up Garett Bolles late last year."

In the event that Mayfield slides to the late-second or early-third round, however, that could open the door for wide receiver Nico Collins to be the second Wolverine drafted. Collins is seen as a third-round pick, but there's a possibility that a team could take a chance on him in the second round, meaning he could go before Mayfield. Still, he's likely a day two selection.