Hold The Phone! Tuesday Open Thread

Hey kids. Where do you want to go?

That’s right. To Uncle Mayhem’s Clubhouse.

I was in Vegas this weekend and ended up in the Excalibur, which is a questionable decision in itself. But I flashed back to the Inagural DFOCon in 2016 and started trying to find the giant neon “FUN DUNGEON!” sign that Rikki-Tikki-Deadly famously photo-humped.

Yes Rikki, I still have the video.

I never found it- the bartender I accosted thinks they took it down, but he may have just been intimidated by my intensity. But I did find the bar where I had my first real conversation with tWBS, God rest his smutty soul.  It was weird. I’ve lost enough people to know that they leave…let’s call them echoes. Not ghosts, but memory associations strong enough to be uncomfortably real when you see a place someone should be but isn’t.  Once I got over the sense of the surreal, I decided he would probably like the idea that part of his spirit was hanging out at this shitty casino bar upstairs from the Fun Dungeon.

Then I met LeVar Burton. It was a fucking surreal weekend across the board.

NFL NEWS: Whelp, we’re about three weeks away from the draft, which in recent years has been the start of the Silly Season for trading draft picks. These early moves are often centered around getting high enough to draft the QB of your choice (or for the 2021 49ers, whichever of the top 3 was left). This year is a little weird, because it’s likely the weakest QB class since the 2014 Blake Bortles Bonanza. Even the most QB-hungry teams have not convinced themselves that Malik Willis is worth mortgaging the future for…yet.

Enter the Eagles and Saints. The Iggles had stockpiled an impressive three mid-first-round picks (15, 16 and 19) after much effort last year. Then they realized that having that many mid-round picks is somewhat stupid, unless you want to package them to move up. Only this year, there’s not really any consensus team-changer worth that kind of move, putting Howie Rosemann into a bad situation.

Enter the Aints, who after a decade of Salary Cap Fuck Around are in Year 2 of Find Out. They have a roster consisting of the Old, The Bad and the Unlikely to Stay On the Field.  After yet more kicking the can down the road to field a team this year, they are staring down a likely $27 million overshoot of next year’s cap. Accordingly, they need young, cost-controlled talent in a bad way. They also held the number 18 pick.

RELEASE THE TRADE! In a flurry of numbers, the Saints received two 2022 first-round picks (No. 16 and No. 19) and a 2022 sixth-round pick (No. 194) while the Eagles received a 2022 first-round pick (No. 18), a 2023 first-round pick, a 2024 second-round pick, plus 2022 third-round (No. 101) and seventh-round selections (No. 237).

Ignoring the chaff, New Orleans paid a second and third rounder to move ahead of the Chargers at pick 17 and advance their 2023 first rounder to this year- either to help get their salary structure right, try to make a run while they have Cheap Jameis, Kamara and Michael Thomas or to package and move up for (presumably) Kenny Pickett. Philly in turn ensured they will have two first rounders next year to package for Jalen Hurts’ replacement.

As always, the urge to grade the trade now is strong. But the value of these picks can only be judged once we see what they do with them. Given that neither of these teams has shown particular skill at predraft talent evaluation over the last several years, and this is a very murky draft to begin with, I am going out on a limb and say they both lose based on the likelihood that they both shoot themselves in the dick.

Tonight’s sports:

I dunno. The shambling corpse of the NBA season? Preseason baseball?

I suggest Moon Knight. I haven’t watched it. But sure, fuckit. Moon Knight.