NFL draft uncertainty may make 1st round wild
Without a consensus on top players, more trades, surprise picks possible
 Darron Cummings / AP Wake Forest linebacker Aaron Curry could be the top pick in the NFL draft. |
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On Tuesday, an NFC general manager told me he can’t recall a draft in which there was so much uncertainty about who the top three selections in the draft would be.
“It’s a very cloudy picture,” he said. “There’s no consensus on who the best players are at each position, so you’re getting wild variations on what teams around the league are expecting.”
When I asked Patriots coach Bill Belichick about that notion at his pre-draft press conference, Belichick concurred.
“In previous years, for the most part, I think if you saw a team coming up and they were going for a certain position, you would be able to identify the player they are going up for,” he said. “Now, as you put it, ‘Who’s the top running back? Who’s the top receiver? Who’s the top tackle? Who’s the top corner?’ If you survey different teams and you know what’s on their boards, I think there is quite a bit of variability from team to team as to who those top guys are.”
And that sets the stage for a very unpredictable first round on Saturday. The Detroit Lions and Georgia quarterback Matthew Stafford reached a deal Friday night to make the quarterback the No. 1 overall pick.
Now it gets murky.
St. Louis, you're on the clock.
“I think it’s really hard to predict who wants who,” said Belichick.
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“You have to make a quicker decision (than when teams had 15 minutes on the clock in the first round),” said Belichick. “I don’t think it means you can’t (make deals); you just have to make a quicker decision.
“Sometimes in the past with more time you can play two or three teams off each other. You’re on the phone with this team or you’re on the phone with that team and it may be a little bit of a bidding situation and vice versa with you being on the other end of the phone and not getting an answer back because you know they are shopping it to other teams. There’s probably a little less of that because you don’t have much time.”
Several team official think this is a draft with talent; it just doesn’t have that elite tier of five-to-seven players before it drops off.
“There’s fluctuation as to who’s the best center, best back, best quarterback, best receiver, best tackle, best corner. You hear a lot of different names getting slung around and I can see why,” Belichick said. “You can like one player for this and another player for that. After you get past that first wave of 20, 25 players, then it starts to be kind of a normal draft.
“The top of this draft is a little bit less predictable than it normally would be,” Belichick added. “Last year, you had a pretty good sense of who the players were. (Jake) Long was the top tackle, (Glenn) Dorsey was the best defensive tackle, (Matt) Ryan was the top quarterback, (Chris) Long was the top defensive end. It was a lot more set last year than what it seems this year.”
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