The Consigliere

I'm not entirely sold that these guys are made. Actually I'm not sold, though I acknowledge, some of your guys listed, fit that tag perfectly: Hurts, Prescott, in particular stick out as guys that were really suspect coming in. Prescott was lumped in with a tier of busts and they managed to avoid the guys they actually wanted that busted (Paxton Lynch, and then Michigan State guy the Raiders wanted: they had both of those guys ahead of Prescott, both got peeled off, settled for Michael Irvin's guy Prescot, and won), Hurts was more complicated: promising traits, but borderline broken as a thrower, and then turned into a legit passer....But other guys listed I just disagree with. Wilson was a stud, and a transfer, but he was drafted into a league where he was short, and a creator who relied on ahtleticism in a league that distrusted guys his size who ran around (a lot of bust dual threat guys in the later aughts, Locker had just busted etc), I think Purdy was Purdy, just nobody was sure if Purdy could be Purdy, I'm not sure what to think of Love, because I think he's really what he was: he was that arm, that athleticism and that inaccuracy, but there's also no arguing that he seemed to click on last year enough to be a usable starter with a really high ceiling...interesting. Allen, Lamar and Patrick were all ceiling bets to me, I'm sure coaching did some of that, but there was also a reason Allen was #1 on a lot of boards in '17, and Lamar was pretty high on some in '17, and Mahomes always seemed like a guy who was either a grand slam, or a fail, kind of like Daniels, not a lot of middle. Interesting to think about...not sure.... I'm also not entirely sold on the idea that we were 100% about fixing the defense, I really do kinda think we were hitting the board, period, after the Daniels pick. We had needs everywhere so anyone was justifiable.... Seems like 36 was about sorting value: the best WR's were gone, so it was the best DB, best OL, or best DL, and we took the highest rated guy on PFF boards by far. We trade down from 40 and it kind of makes sense, no OT goes between basically the late first and the late 2nd, so it does seem like they thought: We have WR needs, TE need, DB need, LB need, OL need, there will be guys on our board at 50, 53, and 67 in our current tier then, and they were right: The DB they took may not have been tiered with the dude the Eagles took or Kool-Aid, but he was close to it, and we turned a 70something pick into 53 moving up 20 picks by doing it. So we peeled off the best available slot corner, best available athlete TE, and one of the next tier of OT's (after looking through the ranks its clear that Coleman was very much in the same tier of guys that started with Paul, and unlike a lot of them had positional versatility: a big thing for a team like us that needs everything beyond one guard slot and Center).... So to me anyway, it looked like they were working their board and it fell too: 2 their fav QB 36 could not move up for OT, so took best player on board who happened to play D. If one of the WR's fal, do they go WR? I'd like to think Ladd would be considered, but with Ladd and the other guy gone, the DT or a DB made the most sense. 40 trade down: Clearly seems like they viewed this tier as lasting into early round 3, and worth moving down to get 3 instead of just 2. 50 and 53: Take the best corner available that a ton of people liked, take best athlete TE available (and analytics suggests, betting on athleticism w/TE's gets you more hits than any other strategy) then grab 67: Guard who is in the same tier of guys who go between 55 and 79. Seems like it was just: QB, then D, then D, then O, then O, then O, day 3 is mostly D (maybe all D? Can't remember), but day 3 picks are heavily tilted toward dart throws, what tells you the strategy is how they used day 1 and day 2 capital, the most valuable assets, and that was a TE, an OL, a QB, a WR, a DT and a DB. So for me, anyway, I think they were playing that draft music of best player available, and that's how the board fell. There's things I like and things I don't or didn't, but I definitely can see the rationale for everything.

It's so utterly asinine that it underlines why I don't view anyone as good at this, including Peters, hopefully we're just lucky. We deserve it anyway. No team has gone longer without drafting and developing a true franchise QB that mattered than us (Baugh). That being said, I do believe it's totally possible our board could be like that. Boards are always weird. The only thing for sure consensus is either all or nearly all had Caleb #1. After that, I definitely think there was disagreement. I'm a bit bitter we won that final weekend tiebreaker with New England to jump ahead of them, otoh, you fudge with that, and we probably end up 4 instead of 2 rather than 3 instead of 2, but yeah, its tempting as hell to have not jumped New England, and gotten the 3 and Maye instead, except there is a real possibility we would have done something very nutty instead of taking Maye. I don't think I'm wrong about Maye, but considering how bad New England is, and how stupid their 2nd rounder at WR was (Polk), I could totally see Maye looking like trash for a few years. At least they got Baker late, he could be a nice day 3 add, but good lord, Jaylynn Polk ahead of AD Mitchell, Roman Wilson, Troy Franklin etc. Just stupid (to me anyway).

Someone mentioned the jones fracture being a reason for the DT's drop into our lap.

That is a lot. The only one I can speak to really is Sinnott. To me, this draft had Bowers, the surprisingly athletic Sinnott, Jaheim Bell even if size afflicted, and then the guy whose always been #2 for a year but slipped a little in the predraft process in JT Sanders. If we were taking a TE, it was most likely day 2 or a trade down to early day 3 because the only guys worth taking after Bowers were Sinnott, Bell and Sanders, and Bell is a weird size dude. So them taking Sinnott was surprising in terms of how early, but not surprising in terms of who: if we took a TE this year, he was basically one of 2 guys it could be. Hampton and McGee are really interesting to me because both have weird profiled but really promising ones as well. I don't know how to think of McCaffrey at all, Im very inclined to think it was incredibly stupid, but the measurables are exciting and as you like to mention, there's a narrative that could explain things (QB late convert to WR) and suggest he could be promising given a season or two to learn to be a professional big slot etc. When I looked at PFF's rating my eyes basically went like that truck drivers in Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

That's wild, definitely nowhere near clear enough. It is 3 first rounds, but it's a giant tier drop, for meh picks, and a future first that is unlikely to be high as well. I was expecting much better offers than that. Exciting to think about. Do NFL teams use this tech?

This was a chalk opening before people started taking crazy pills. If the top 6 stayed at slot, all 6 were projected to take who was taken, the only exception was Alt, but that was because Vegas was betting San Diego would trade down then take Alt, all of the first 6 were projected to go there if no movement happened. I was briefly feeling like a genius until I realized that odds were, all 6 of those guys would go there, unless anyone jumped into the top 6 (or the Giants moved up from 6). I tend to think Daniels going #2 kind of locked up the slotting, no mad rush for Daniels, and Patriots never got the godfather offer to push them off Maye. Much more impressive would be hitting a wacky draft top 6, this wasn't one of those. Will be interesting to see what happens w/it being chalk, with the fullness of time.

Definitely like the way 6 of the top 10 and 7 of the top 12 fit needs (OT, Edge, CB, WR).

Are we even sure we were picking DeJean at 40? Like everyone else, I had either DeJean or Kool Aid as my preferred target at 36 and 40, not even thinking about the DT (though I love that selection) but why are we so sure, at all, that if we'd stuck at slot, we'd take DeJean. Unless there's a quote, that's really just wishcasting. We hope we would've been smart enough to value him as the best guy w/o a trade down but history suggests the pick would have been off everyone's board, just like 36 was.

I'd argue that we were clearly right to pass on 36 and 40 as the next tier of Tackles after the ones that went 5-26 (and at dallas's pick, 29) as none went in the 2nd round until 55, a good half round after our first second rounder. I think the question going forward will be how the guys pan out from that group of: Paul Fisher Rosegarten Suamataia Coleman Wallace Ameg Basically there was a minor 2nd run at tackle: the first run went 5-29, the second went 55-79, we took I think the 5th of 7 or 8 to go. If Coleman hits, it doesn't matter that we waited until round 3 because we pulled our guy from the same tier, and unlike some of those guys, our guy can play Guard and Tackle, which is almost certainly why we took him: positional versatility. If he misses, and the guys so many of us liked like Pau and Sua, become painful misses. We'll see.

We did that a couple years ago and it meant ---- all. I want great NFL players, the Captain piece is a nice addition if they are legit difference makers, if not, who cares.

Two full offseasons, competitive hopefully by year 3, maybe a 6-8 win team by year 2. If everything works. I know I'm negative, but negative has been correct most of the last six or seven seasons, and Vegas agrees with me, I believe they have us either 26th or 25th best in terms of O/Under wins. I have us around 27th as I mentioned earlier, I'm a little more negative than Vegas, seeing a floor of 4 wins, a ceiling of 7 and an expectation of 5.5 to 6. We had to replace what, 5 or 6 of 8 OL's, our WR's are either exiting their prime in McLaurin's case or coming back from a disappointing sophomore campaign in Dotson's, our TE room is comically bad (hence Sinnott), our RB room are a collection of JAG's athletically and a gifted player that's two years past the RB age cliff, our DL lacks any edge talent to speak of, our LB corpse did get some nice pieces this offseason, but came into FA w/mostly ----, the DB's have had a lot of draft capital invested to little effect....ST's is a good punter and nothing else. It was a ghastly roster, it's still a bad one. We lack depth, and talent. We added some this weekend, and a few guys that will move the needle in FA. It's certainly a negative perspective, but to me, we really earned that 4-13 record, not just by having a disengaged coach and quitting team but really by taking next to nothing of quality out of the past five or six drafts. This really is a build it up through scratch build. Consider it this way, how many of our guys are guys other teams would genuinely want to acquire to significantly improve at any given positional group? Who would other average or good or better teams want? You can point to a Punter, since departed Curl, Jonathan Allen, DaRon Payne, Cosmi, Brian Robinson, Terry McLaurin and our punter. That is it and among those guys there are really only 3-4 guys beyond the punter that are viewed as top 70th percentile or thereabouts at their position. We lack any kind of top end talent largely to speak of, and what we have (Allen, Payne, Cosmi McLaurin) are all over age, save Cosmi. It's dire. No top end talent (guys that would make say an NFL top 100) Little if any top 75th percentile talent. Little depth. Few Starters you'd give a next contract too. That's why I see us as really horrible, the situation is right in the very roots of the org. We are right there with Carolina, Tennessee, Denver, Oakland, and New England etc. It's quite bad. The good news is we added a couple legit plus guys in FA, and our draft haul included probably a good 2-3 guys that could end up plus, and another 2 or 3 that could be league average starters with some breaks. That's progress, but it's still a gazillion miles away from a competitive team. Which is why I want us to suck next year, but have promising developments with the kiddos. We need another 2 offseasons to fix this to the point that there's any chance of this team becoming legit competitive consistently and not a 1 off type like the '99, '05, '07, '12, '15 and '20 squads (and the '20 squad was trash). I'm hoping for 4-5 wins, hopefully no more than 6. That will help. That and Daniels being the hit the FO and the league thinks he is, and not the injury riddled disaster I fear he might be.

Wow, Quinn sounds pretty freaking good. Peters already sounds good. But wow, Quinn doing that? Is either Nixon level neuroticism, or the height of best practices and good process, "reflection" at its finest.

Depending upon which big board your talking about guys like Daniels, Sinnott, McCaffrey were all reaches and all day 1 and day 2 guys. A lot of people disagree on that, it's open to interpretation. I think it's pretty clear that we had an interesting draft with a lot of athleticism and upside, but in terms of landing guys at value, that's basically the DT, the Safety, and the LB, those 3 guys are the 3 we got below where they were expected to go, I think the other 6 were at slot or over slot. Time will tell but for now, in terms of VBD, we reached quite a bit (but I like most of the guys we reached for).

Med red flags, or off the field red flags?

You waste at least half if not more of the rookie deal, and as mentioned, Penix isn't just old, he's exceptionally old, approaching Brandon Weeden/Hayden Hurst level of stupid considering how old he is. I really liked Penix as a value choice when I thought you could get him round 2 or later in round 1, using a top 10 pick on him was asinine, using a top 10 pick when you already gave Cousins the bag, hell multiple bags, is beyond stupid. If it was JJ, it would still be stupid, but at least he's young and with clean medicals throughout his career. Instead you have an old, overage prospect with med flags out the yin yang, who will be 26 before he starts year 3. Its crazy pills. There's a reason the NFL looked at Atlanta and just shook their head in shock, repeatedly like the notorious old raider and jet first round foul ups. People were arguing over the weekend on whether it was literally the worst draft pick ever when all things are considered. It's a good contender but there's worse, for sure.

You have to acknowledge that the eagles are fundamentally in a different spot than the WFT. We simply lack the assets anywhere to justify such long term building strategies. We don't have anything anywhere in depth other than maybe DT, but even DT is an issue because both guys are out on a free soon, and both are aging out of relevance for extensions beyond the length of their current deals. So you can technically justify investments of draft capital pretty much anywhere, everything needs help. I'd like to build a team like the eagles as well, but the eagles have a roster so good, it was in the Super Bowl and probably should've won just 16 months ago. The last time they had back to back sub .500 seasons suggestive of serious roster build problems was '15-'16, or eight years ago and before that they had had back to back 10-6 seasons so it wasn't even that bad in the first place. The WFT has been an abject disaster scene for eight years, the polar opposite of Philly (our last positive back to back seasons were '15-'16, a flip side to Philly's run), and in truth, more accurately, for 32 years. Since that 17-14-1 run, we've been remarkably below average until we imploded completely in '23 (we won 7 or 8 games in '17, '18, '20, '21 and '22). Overall though, the truth is in those ugly numbers, we haven't won more than half our games in 8 years, and won 4 last year. Our record since that last quality playoff appearance ('20 was a joke), 51-78-2 since that crushing loss to Green Bay in the playoffs with Cousins after the early lead. With two seasons in the past five years where we finished bottom 2 in the league, that tells the tale. We can't do what the eagles are doing because we lack any of the assets to do it.

Well, we've only finished the bottom 2 in the league once in my lifetime, so it kinda makes sense. Then add a dash of 0 quality drafts under Ron, and next to no veteran help from the Bruce Allen craptacular era, and it makes sense. As I mentioned before FA, in terms of position Groups: QB: D OL; D- TE: F WR: D+ RB: D+ Edge: F DT: B- LB: F CB: D- S: D- ST's: I don't know but it sounds like we have a nice punter and nothing else. People will disagree w/some of those, but to my mind, nearly our entire line needed replacement, our entire QB room, our entire TE room, nearly all our RB room, our Edge room, most of our LB's are total ---, our secondary is patently god awful and the only guy that didn't suck was leaving. It's definitely gonna take more than one offseason to fix all that. The OL is particularly interesting as it had basically one or two quality lineman, in Stromberg an injured late 3rd rounder, and then some underperforming vets, and utter horse manure that couldn't beat out the worst OL's in the league at multiple positions (or close to it). This will take years to fix. If you botch every offseason for the most part for a decade, and all four of the Ron ones, you aren't gonna fix all that with some heavy cap room and like 2 more draft picks than usual. The good news is unlike the past, when we had fewer picks than anyone else, this time we had more, and we traded zero future picks which was a nice change of pace.

Do you think he might have gone higher if he'd spent more of his time there rather than on the bench at Ohio State? Reading about him, seems like the floor is reasonably decent, and there's more upside than usual for a 7th round edge we draft (I think we haven't hit on a late round edge since Richie Redskin in '94 or '95 whenever he came out-can't remember how late round he was). Part of me is optimistic, but the experienced me just tosses him the bin with the rest of late day 3 edge's who've sucked 96% of the time.

Anyone have data on how effectively RAS ratings translate going forward? I'm too lazy to dig beyond finding a teeny bit of data from last year (Richardson was great, our injury riddled center was great, packers TE Musgrave was great, our should've been DB Gonzalez was great).

3 of our top 6 picks on day 1 and day 2 were offense including the most valuable draft capital we had. It doesn't really matter that a couple of 5th rounders and a 7th were on the defensive side of the ball as day 3 picks miss the vast majority of the time. We were unlikely to get offensive help there anyway. I'm not happy either, in some ways, I don't love what we did with Philly in the trade, and I don't love the Sinnott pick at 53 or the McCaffrey pick at 100, and I hope they weren't trying to fix a defense I was told a few months ago when I projected a crap '24 season, was actually good in '22, and maybe not the disaster it looked because well, its ron's fault or whatever, but anyway....the reality is, this team is and was a mess at DB, LB, Edge, OL, WR, RB, TE and QB. You can't fix it all in one draft or one offseason. I'm alarmed they didn't do more for the OL either, but nobody was terribly interested in trading down to our slot, and we ended up with an OL in Coleman that's both versatile, and considered by the NFL.Com dude and Brugler to be of the same tier as Paul, Rosegarten, and the guy with the long hard to spell name.... Im very torn, part of me feels like you do, but part of me gets it, and just views what happened as a situation in which he took advantage of the talent that fell to him. My one major gripe is that they didn't turn 5 day 2 picks into any 2025 draft capital at all and we aren't getting compensatories either after the free agency palozza we just had. I'm bummed we didnt spin some golden loom for next year...we should have. Maybe we end up trading some vets for picks before the dealine again, but we don't have many anyone would want.

It's more a "don't get enamored with specific players you think we may draft outside of a top 2-3 pick". Every year people have their favorites on day 3 and day 2 and 95% of the time we don't take them. Better to tier out your favorites by position, by day of the draft, so you're familiar w/the guys we do take, amongst the ones you liked, or ignored/didn't.

Matt Kelley over at player profiler has him basically in his like top 5 or so at RB, and he landed in a great spot.

Unfortunately the one example I heard of that was Kyle pounding the table for Joe Williams, who, needless to say, left no mark on the game whatsoever. I appreciate the idea, though, honestly, I want the GM to collect the information available, hold their meetings and make a choice on draft day, I don't want some position coach trumping the GM w/a pounding the table move at like 1023am on a saturday, either you convinced the GM the previous four months, or you didn't. Otoh, Tom Brady, more or less, was the product of a similar effort with the Patriots brain test, lower level officials advocating hard for him way back in 2000.

Interesting, a bunch of these guys have elite athleticism, Sinnott, the LB, McCaffrey, maybe the DB, can't remember with him, the DT had ridiculous explosion too, sounds like Coleman has it too. A lot of elite athletes.

Nice pull.