LAOJoe & RTTRUTH's 12th Annual Collaborative Mock Draft

Atlanta drafted one of those guys last year. Seemed like no one could make up their mind whether to refer to him as a WR or RB. In the end it didn't matter because a hamstring injury knocked him out until training camp anyway, which left him with pretty much zero chance of making the roster.

 

I hear what you're saying. I think the league will view him as a WR. The versatility will push him up a bit.

 

Kinda depends on how the team sees him, doesn't it? If a team drafts him as a RB, won't the league have to see him as a RB?

I get that he's multi-faceted, and some are calling him a RB/WR. But I see him as a 3rd down specialist RB. I've seen him get the comparison to James White, and I think that's pretty accurate.

 

I think that at least once upon a time, the players themselves had a say in which position they were announced. Not sure exactly what the current process is. But it used to be that when the teams handed in the cards, the league officials there at the table checked the cards for accuracy and could modify things like the spelling of the name or the position before it got announced.

 

There was one last year. Lynn Bowden - drafted by the Raiders and traded to Miami before the season even started. Nobody seems to be able to identify if he's a RB or WR. Raiders saw him as reciever, Miami seems to see him as a RB....Naturally, he was a quarterback in college.

 

I assume we can count on the position draft order challenge being a thing again this year??

Safeties
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

 

Posted. Ready to roll... Hope we get lots of players!

 

Amusing story on a mishap with those draft cards...

Rich McKay was part of the Buccaneers "family" long before he became the team's legal counsel and The Accidental GM. He was the son of the head coach, and both GM Ken Herock and team owner Hugh Culverhouse knew and liked the young man. One of the extra things he did as a team gopher in those days was that at he was one of the runners on site at the draft that filled in the cards and took them up to the front table to be checked and announced.

Except he missed the 1982 draft, because he was in law school at the time. And without him, they had a mishap that would lead to the team's implosion and ultimately Herock's dismissal as GM.

Herock was hot to take a Bethune-Cookman defensive end named Booker Reese in the first round. But thanks to a mishap, the team somehow turned in the wrong draft card and drafted Penn State offensive guard Sean Farrell completely by mistake.

Tampa didn't have a second round pick, having traded it in a package deal for two players back in 1980. But Herock would not be deterred. He just HAD to get Booker Reese. So he traded his future first round pick to the Bears for their early second round pick, and Tampa got Reese after all. Happy ending, right?

Well... Doug Williams left Tampa for a real paycheck in the USFL after that season, and backup Mike Bell also left the team. So the Bucs were left without a first round draft pick for the 1983 "Year Of The Quarterback" draft. They watched as Chicago used their pick to take Willie Gault, and shortly afterwards the Jets and Dolphins took quarterbacks Ken O'Brien and Dan Marino.

But there has to be a happy ending, right? Sure! Herock simply traded the future first round pick yet again, sending it to the Bengals for their third string quarterback, "Throwin' Samoan" Jack Thompson. Who needs a scrub like Dan Marino anyway?

Thompson was a complete bust. Booker Reese was a complete bust. The Buccaneers became the worst team in the NFL, so the future first that they traded away became the #1 pick in the draft. (New England traded up to get that pick from the Bengals and selected Irving Fryar). Sean Farrell had a 11-year career but said that all he wanted for Christmas was to get out of Tampa. He got his wish in 1986.

 

This got an audible chuckle.

 

Bridgewater to Broncos.

Interesting in the contract details, as Bridgewater agreed to a new contract and BOTH teams agreed to the terms as part of the trade.

If I had theoretically assumed that Atlanta would be able to negotiate a similar deal, I would indeed have worked out some kind of trade with @StlCurtain and traded for Teddy in the mock.

 

Can’t say I didn’t try

 

I think Delpit was the ONLY current player traded in this entire draft....that kinda blows my mind.

 

I was very much interested too.

I've already forgotten the exact details, but I think his guaranteed salary was $15 million under the previous contract.

Bridgewater took a pay cut to make the real life deal happen, and the Panthers are the team paying over 2/3 of his total money rather than the Broncos. So instead of $15 million guaranteed, Denver is on the hook for just $4.5 million total, and only $3 million of that is guaranteed.

In real life, Atlanta doesn't have the cap space even for that reduced deal (OverTheCap lists them at just under $1 million available cap space), which once again shows just how deep the team's former braintrust dug themselves into a pit. But it's close enough that RT and Joe might have said it's within reason to assume that I would figure something out to fit him under the cap.

 

And I did make an offer on him too. The deal you ended up getting was better - but you did have to work at it quite a bit. I'd say that's why it happened. You worked the phones hard to get that trade.


Since you were curious before, my valuation was that Delpit was a legit second round player before the injury. But he's trying to come back from a torn Achilles. He hasn't played a single snap in the NFL, and when the season starts it will have been 20 months since his last true game snap. If he was part of this year's draft class in exactly the same situation, he certainly wouldn't go in the second round and probably not until the fourth or later.

So I put a fourth round value on him - and I offered the last pick of round 3.

I knew that a team with an urgent need might go higher, and ultimately one did. But I wasn't in that kind of need at all.

 

In all honesty, it was more about being patient, and reminding people he was on the block. Delpit generated plenty of interest, as he should...But yeah, I kept at it after I knew I had the future #2 if I wanted. Looking over my draft, I got a lot of players that I liked, but I really don't think Cleveland has nearly that many roster spots available. I was trying like hell, as you know, to trade up in round one and round two, but I think I was just on at the wrong times because I wasn't even getting responses on probably 70% of my attempts. So I just made picks. Over the next two days however, I'm expecting Andrew Berry to get aggressive. Hopefully other teams will respond. lol! j.k....

I'm psyched for the CLEVELAND draft.

 

Just putting it together for my own purposes. I probably like the Bills draft best followed by the Saints and Eagles but I'm splitting hairs and will change my mind a dozen times before the draft.

Bills
1(30) Tyson Campbell, CB - Georgia
3(13) Baron Browning, LB - Ohio State
3(29) Tylan Wallace, WR - Oklahoma State
4(3) Patrick Jones, DE - Pittsburgh
5(17) Jay Tufele, DT - USC
5(30) Tay Gowan, CB - UCF
6(1) Tutu Atwell, WR - Louisville
7(8) Kylen Granson, TE/FB - SMU
UDFA. Larry Rountree, RB - Missouri
UDFA. Damar Hamlin, S - Pittsburgh

Saints
1(4) Trey Lance, QB - North Dakota State
2(25) Aaron Robinson, CB - UCF
3(39) Chazz Surratt, LB - North Carolina
4(36) Andre Cisco, S - Syracuse
6(43) Tedarrell Slaton, DT - Florida
7(1) Marquez Stevenson, WR - Houston
7(10) Jake Curhan, OL - California
UDFA. Matt Bushman, TE - BYU
UDFA. Tarron Jackson, EDGE - Coastal Carolina

Eagles
1(12) Devonta Smith, WR - Alabama
2(5) Gregory Rousseau, DE - Miami
2(24) Jackson Carman, OT - Clemson
3(20) Rodarius Williams, CB - Oklahoma State
5(6) JaCoby Stevens, LB - LSU
5(32) Trey Hill, C - Georgia
6(5) Caden Sterns, S - Texas
7(31) John Bates, TE - Boise State
UDFA. Drue Chrisman, P - Ohio State
UDFA. Peyton Ramsey, QB - Northwestern

 

I love what you did with the Saints.

 

@LAOJoe you didn’t stump the truck

 

Damn lol.

 

Call me crazy, but I've been following the draft as close as I can since the first year it was ever televised...."Do you believe in miracles?"

Yeah, it's been a while...

As far as snap judgments go, I think this was one of the strongest Browns drafts I can ever remember.

(could be the Tito's, but I don't think so)