What Draft?: Tuesday Open Thread

So that was something, huh? To get 27 picks into the NFL Draft and then have the entire city of Detroit fall into a gaping chasm in the Earth’s crust, a la the very fine text game Fallen London? I feel for all those trapped in their new underground catacomb, but if anyone can adapt to a new fungus-centric economy and diet, it’s the city that gave us Little Caesars.

I look forward to seeing who the Bills draft when the Draft resumes tomorrow.

So yes, I’ve chosen “denial” and a retreat into my own reality over acknowledgement that Brandon Beane:

1. Traded with the Chiefs again so that the latter could move up for a player both franchises needed (a la Patrick Mahomes in 2017),

2. Kept trading back- not for additional picks, but to marginally improve the position of late round picks, and then

3. Drafted Keon Coleman, another big, slow receiver out of Florida State (a la Kelvin Benjamin in…2017…)

Indeed, I literally yelled at my phone “Why did you draft Kelvin Benjamin!?! You know how this ends!”

Also, yes: I will be following through on my Big Turk wager before next week’s column. I will let you know if matured taste has rendered it any less…unpalatable.

-On the upside, we didn’t use a top 10 draft pick on another quarterback, so at least we feel better than Atlanta fans. I can construct a logical- perhaps even likely- narrative:

1. Atlanta had tampered the shit out of Kirk Cousins going back to early February. Was committed going into the Combine.

2. Atlanta liked what they saw at the Combine, but still needed Cousins (and would be outed for tampering by his agent if they reneged)

3. They follow through on signing Cousins, but frontload the guaranteed money so they can reasonably hit Eject in 2026 if he sucks/his successor comes along.

4. The Falcons brass attends Penix’s March workouts and fall in love. They start investigating trading back to maximize value while getting Their Guy.

5. Terry Fontenot realizes that the only available trades for Pick #8 would take them behind Minnesota, Denver and the Raiders, and he gets spooked (probably correctly) that Penix will be gone by then.

6. Fontenot rationalizes that sitting Penix for a year and a half will do him some good- let him get healthy, bulk up, learn the offense, etc. and that overdrafting Bijan Robinson worked out fine.

7. He approaches 81 year-old Arthur Blank while he is distracted trolling for Future Ex-Mrs. Blank #4 and gets signoff.

8. Raheem Morris quietly seethes, realizing that he has been set up to be fired just as Penix hits his stride.

All of this is a stupid plan, in that it involves huge opportunity costs in a league that often punishes such waste. But I believe that by Draft Night, the Falcons were confronting a scenario with no “good” solution. The correct answer, of course, was “Don’t sign Kirk Cousins in the first place” but having sunk that cost faster than a homemade submarine, it was a semi-rational decision at the time.

Discounting, of course, the Kirk Cousins Effect. By most accounts Cousins is an uber-competitive dickhole, and even the people who like him seem to agree. He played fairly well while disgruntled in Washington, so maybe this will just be Fuel For The Fire of His Faith In Christ. But I have trouble with the concept that he will be any more of a “mentor” than Aaron Rodgers was in Green Bay..

-Sean Payton and George Paton have to be thanking their lucky stars for the Falcons. After two seasons of extraordinarily expensive Quarterback Follies, Denver was desperate for a quarterback- and they weren’t even trying to play it cool. Like, the guy on eHarmony who showed up for the first date with a ring “just in case.”

I said drafting Bo Nix this high would be GM Malpractice, and I’m standing by that. He was a #30 pick value-wise, and Denver is a team with more holes to fill than [AUTHOR’S NOTE: ASK BALLS FOR AN APPROPRIATE PORN STAR]. Building around a quarterback is a Great Plan, but you need to have something left to build with.

To tie back to the previous item, this is how the league punishes wasted opportunities. Denver had so few resources thanks to their prior profligacy on Russell Wilson and Sean Payton that it was basically Nix whenever they could get him or Spencer Rattler in the fourth round. Needing to land Nix this desperately, Paton couldn’t chance trading down past a team like the Rams who could rationally take a flyer on him, or the Raiders moving back into the end of Round 1. So they were forced to panic draft way above value in order to keep from missing out entirely.

Maybe Nix will prove all of us wrong; after all, everyone thought Sam Darnold and Baker Mayfield were solid picks, while the Bills were “reaching” for Josh Allen. But on it’s face this was clownshoes all the way down and I cannot wait for breathless media coverage of the three-way training camp competition between Nix, Jarrett Stidham and Zach Wilson.

To all my DFO Bronco Fans:

NFL News:

-The deadline for teams to exercise the Fifth Year Option on 2021 first round picks is Thursday, and we are starting to see some final movement on players. While picking up the Fifth Year (or having it superseded by a long-term contract) isn’t a perfect measure for draft success, it’s at least a defensible approximation for “This guy has performed well”. As it stands, four of the five quarterbacks (Wilson, Trey Lance, Justin Fields and White Mac) either will not or likely will not have the option exercised. That’s four of the fourteen players left out in the cold, and they will likely make up more than a third of the Unofficial Busts by Thursday night once teams get off the fence on a few more players. Maybe one will pull a Daniel Jones and have a career year to get that long term extension (or at least a franchise tag) but I’m not putting money on it.

-Zeke back to the Cowboys! Everything’s fine in Dallas now, right? Right?

-Zay Jones better be headed back to Buffalo. We are apparently fine with allegations of domestic violence as long as there is no conviction.