What makes a pick a steal or a reach?
The distance between where a player was taken and where the board had him — measured against the board we published beforehand.
A steal is a player drafted meaningfully later than our board had him. A reach is one drafted meaningfully earlier. The verdict is arithmetic on two numbers, not an opinion formed after the fact.
That only means something because the board is published and frozen before the draft. Anyone can identify steals in hindsight; the claim is only worth anything if the ranking existed, in public, before the pick was made.
Both verdicts can be wrong, and we grade them later. A "steal" is a prediction that the player will outperform his draft slot, and some don't. The re-grade archive scores those calls against real careers rather than quietly forgetting them.
One thing a steal is not: proof the board beats NFL war rooms. Teams rank better than this model overall. Individual divergences that aged well are exactly that — individual.