Year 3 is always the penultimate year of judgement for NFL players.
By the conclusion of their third season, you typically have a solid grasp on what players succeed and underwhelm at, and you can project their career arcs accordingly. It’s also when you can begin to accurately depict the quality of an entire team’s draft class.
It was at the end of this past season when we realized that the Bengals draft classes of 2014 and 2015 were largely unsuccessful, and in a few months, we could be saying the exact opposite about the draft class of 2016.