Twelve People In NFL Draft Rooms Share Notes On Picks, Prospects & Trades

It’s a different year in the draft. It’s too early to say who’s going where, and too early to know who’s trading with whom, because most teams are in the final days of stacking their boards and placing values on players. But there are two things in the NFL’s 87th draft that stand out, from conversations with 12 GMs/coaches/personnel people on Friday and Saturday:

1. This could be the first draft since the NFL began the “Annual College Player Selection Meeting” in 1936 that has no one who touches the ball getting picked in the top 10. No running backs, of course. Quite possibly no wideouts; the Jets, picking 10th, look to be the first place a receiver might go. And with the quarterback picture so lousy and so cloudy, who knows? We all know Carolina, picking sixth, could well take a quarterback. And we know a desperate team for one (Pittsburgh, picking 20th?) could be motivated to move up for one. “But unless Carolina takes one,” one GM said, “I can’t see any team picking one in the top 10.”

2. It’s going to be a bad year for mock drafts. Great line from a top GM Saturday night: “You can take the top 20 most plugged-in guys in your business. Ask them to pick the top 10 guys in this draft. I would bet a lot of money no two guys have the same top 10. When you don’t know who’s going one or two or three at this point of the year, you’ve got a mysterious year.”

Lots of interesting tributaries to this draft, as told to me by those in the draft rooms over the weekend, and we’ll start with the first pick. After Kyler Murray, Joe Burrow and Trevor Lawrence were locked in atop the three most recent drafts by now, a very unfamous Georgia Bulldog is a serious contender for number one this year.

I asked my 12 draft-authority panelists: