It was a close race for the entire duration of MockOut’s live mock draft Kickoff Contest. The leaderboard fluctuated a lot. But throughout it all, there was one constant: Stephenjpass.

31 picks down, and Stephenjpass was in first place. He had been for most of MockOut’s first-ever mock draft contest. With only one pick left, Stephenjpass was the heavy favorite to take home the $100 prize. There were only two names he did not want to hear. Caleb Brantley or Haason Reddick. He had the field.

He put himself in this inevitable winning position by nailing five of the first seven picks. And then he kept extending his lead, like the Falcons in this past Super Bowl. Of the 32 players, he predicted would be drafted in the first round, 25 of them were picked by the live mock draft GMs.

Speaking of, the GMs who made the picks were playing their own game in the mock draft war room.

Some of the GMs were bloggers like Matt Cohen from Baltimore Beatdown, SB Nation’s Ravens blog. And Jordan de Lugo, head blogger from GenJag. Both had written a lot about who their team should draft, and now both had the chance to test their expertise out in the wild.

And then there were fans of teams who got to control their team’s mock fate for one day. Like SmokeyMcDrunkerson, who landed his team top QB prospect Mitch Trubisky. Immediately after the draft ended, he conducted a mock press conference on the Arizona Cardinals subreddit, congratulating himself on putting the franchise’s mock future on the right mock path, and taking questions from his fellow Cards fans, who wanted to know if Smokey had lost his mind.

But it was GMs like Smokey who made this live mock draft contest so unpredictable. In the first-round-only live mock draft contest, the GMs made eight trades, which included first-round picks, future picks, and even players, like Paxton Lynch. The goal for the GMs was to show how much value they could get for their teams, regardless if players like Lynch only changed jerseys in this mock universe.

OK, back to the game. Back to Stephenjpass.

There were only two other mock draft contest players, CharlieCheeks and MarkSP18, that had a chance to catch up to him if only they could get that last pick of the live mock draft correct — one who had predicted the Patriots GM would take Caleb Brantley, the disruptive DT from Florida, and the other predicted they would take Haason Reddick, the athletic LB from Temple.

Both players hung in there with Stephenjpass throughout the live mock draft contest but made just enough mock draft mistakes to be a half-step below.

Cheeks started off slow after wrongly picking QBs to be drafted early. Trubisky to the 49ers? Wrong. Kizer to the Bears? More wrong. But Cheeks recovered. DeShaun Watson to the Bills? Yup. Derek Barnett to the Colts? Nailed it. Only four players on Cheeks’ mock draft entry were not first rounders. But no matter what Cheeks did, there was no passing Stephenj.

He wasn’t alone. MarkSP18 had some risky picks early at the RB position, believing the 49ers would take Leonard Fournette with the second pick and that the Jets would take Dalvin Cook at 6. Shockingly, he got one of these picks correct, which would set the tone for the rest of the game. MarkSP18 was also one of the very few who knew the Lions would take Zach Cunningham at 21.

But it didn’t matter how many Cooks or Cunninghams he got right. There was only one name on his mind at the end of the game: Caleb Brantley. No other name mattered. It was Brantley or bust.

There was only one pick left. And the Patriots GM — Ryan Keiran podcaster and contributor at PatsPulpit — was on the clock.

You could almost hear Stephenjpass trying to telepathically communicate, “No Brantley no Reddick. No Brantley no Reddick. Anyone else. Just no Brantley and no Reddick.”

And with the last pick in MockOut’s first-ever live mock draft contest, the New England Patriots GM selects…

Haason Reddick, OLB, Temple.

Of all the players in the player pool!

Jaws dropped.

It was the Pats winning the Super Bowl all over again. Or ruining it for another team.

Sorry, Stephenjpass. You played a great game — had an amazing mock draft — but you lost by one Reddick.

CharlieCheeks is our champion!

Holy crap, guys. That was fun. Let’s do it again.

Our next contest is already available, and the results will take place during combine week on Wednesday, March 1st at 8 p.m. EST. You can enter the same mock draft – as-is with no changes – into the next contest. Or, create a brand new one, submit it, and spend the days between now and then honing and editing it. Learning and adapting and tweaking…

…making sure you aren’t the next to get Reddicked.