The Ringer NFL Show - 1,800 Hats, IT Guys in Winnebagos, Herbert Over Tua, and More Weirdness That Will Be the 2020 NFL Draft | The Ringer NFL Draft

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

The Ringer’s Riley McAtee and Rodger Sherman break down all of the weirdness that could happen in the first-ever remote NFL draft, including QB Justin Herbert's late surge to get drafted before Tua Tagovailoa, how the Giants will screw it up, technological mishaps, Roger Goodell on Zoom, the league sending prospects hats from all 32 teams, and more. Hosts: Riley McAtee and Rodger Sherman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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it's an unbelievably great and useful cause that helps our hospital heroes, emergency workers, and local restaurants. Please give whatever you can. The money goes directly to World Central Kitchen, and it is a charitable donation. Once again, that's the ringer.com slash WCK. Hello, and welcome to the Ringer NFL show. I'm Riley McTey and joining me today is Roger Sherman.

Roger, how are you doing? I'm doing good. I'm ready for a sports adjacent product. I can't wait. The NFL draft, baby. Real sports, the NFL draft is happening almost as if nothing else is happening except that it's going to be turned completely upside down and is going to be super bizarre and weird. Yeah, it's the weird draft.

And the NFL draft is already like the weirdest thing that happens in any given sports calendar year. It's just an absurdly. strange process for beginning to end from the combine with the hand sizes to, you know, teams hyping themselves into anonymous scouts. And I feel like everyone's sort of like, wow, this year is the weird draft and general managers might screw it up in funny ways. But they've been, general managers have been screwing drafts up for as long as I've been alive and much longer than that. So given that this draft is happening remotely now instead of Las Vegas, where it was supposed to be. It's going to be like you're saying, a little bit weirder than drafts of the past,

though they are always kind of uniquely bizarre events. And that's what we're here for today. We're here to just break down all of the kind of odd stuff that could take place over the next few days, everything from the draft picks that we're not going to understand to just tech failures as we get 32 GMs trying to somehow have a conference call or a text message or something where they ultimately make these draft picks. There's going to be a lot of unprecedented stuff, I think, that will happen. So let's preview it here. I'm glad you mentioned Vegas. Remember when we thought the Vegas angle was going to be the weirdest thing happening this year? We're like, oh, they're going to do it in the Bellagio Fountain. I'm annoyed that we're not getting the fountain boats, man.

I'm annoyed that we don't get them like kayaking out to go handshake Roger Goodell or whatever the hell the plan was, but it would have been great. We've got to go back to the Fountain Sunday. They can't go away from the Fountain idea. So I need Fountain Draft 2023. It has to go back to Vegas. I'm not actually sure if there's a plan for the draft next year, like if they already have a city picked out or whenever it is, but whatever the next available year is, please go back to Las Vegas or not even back. Just go there for the first time. The draft next year is in Cleveland, I guess, to commemorate their like 15th straight year of having a top 10 pick. Oh, fantastic. Yeah, Cleveland. Cleveland in Vegas. There's almost no

difference whatsoever. Browns fans have gotten used to the draft. They're probably very big NFL draft fans at this point. So I think we can kind of start off by talking about some of the normal things that are weird about the draft. Probably the number one thing coming into this draft before we knew that it was going to take place remotely would have been this. What's happening at the top with the quarterbacks and particularly since we know Joe Burroughs is going number one, that's like a 99% chance to happen. It's this surge now by Justin Herbert where he might get drafted over Tua, which I think everyone, at least here at the ringer just thinks it's ridiculous. Roger, I know you have thoughts on this.

If Justin Herbert goes over to Otago Vailoa, I know that I've, like every year there's a draft quarterback decision that boggles my mind, but to Otago Vailoa is one of the best quarterbacks in college football history. He holds the record for passer efficiency rating. He holds the record for yards for attempt. the record for touchdown rate. He's one of the most fun quarterbacks I've ever watched. It feels like he can accurately make every throw. And Justin Herbert, on the other hand, is tall.

Right. And it seems like that's going to be enough to push Justin Herbert over the top to be the second quarterback pick this year. And my head is going to explode. And I'm going to log offline, and everyone is going to wonder why I'm not writing anything about the draft. And it's because I'll just be like Oliver down society. It's not even just that he's tall. He might even be like too tall. It's one of the bizarre things that Robert Mays wrote about for the website this week is that quarterbacks who are above a certain height have almost no precedent of success.

It's like if you're six, five, you've got like Peyton Manning, you've got Philip Rivers, you've got a lot of these great, great quarterbacks. And then at 6-6, it's like the best quarterback that ever played who is 6-6 or above is like Joe Flacco or something. And so Justin Herbert is above this threshold where it's like, can he possibly be too tall to play quarterback? Does that even make sense? And yet there are scouts and GMs who are falling in love of them anyways because he seemingly has all of the tools, including not just height, but the big arm and a little bit of athleticism and whatever else. But yeah, then you look at their college careers and it's like, wow, Tua led maybe the greatest

offense ever or was the most efficient passer ever and Justin Herbert was, you know, fine at Oregon. Yeah, never spectacular. Tua Tago Viloa did not have, like the last three games of Justin Herbert's career, you know, all under 200 yards, two touchdowns, one interception in three games. He was fine. He was fine. But Tua was just a different level, just like this transcendent college football being. And someone who I love very dearly and someone who I don't want to be hurt anymore, he's been injured.

And I don't want him to be metaphorically hurt by NFL general managers choosing a mediocre Oregon quarterback over him. And, you know, like the injuries are obviously the thing. that I think more than anything else has caused Chua to sink on draft boards. That's probably complicated by the fact that they can't do the most comprehensive medicals on him right now as social distancing is a thing. But for me, at least, I'm comfortable with the risk, with injury risk in general in the draft with almost anybody, but especially at the quarterback position, almost more because I feel like my goal drafting a quarterback is to either find a guy who is going to be a franchise changing passer, like a generational talent, or find a bust. And if they bust,

it's fine. In three or four years, you move on. You can draft another QB. You can find somebody in free agency, but you can have a plan. But where I never want to end up if I'm an NFL team is in that sort of purgatory where you're like, do I hand this guy a contract? Do I hand this guy a contract? Do I build around him. Can you really be the difference maker? Once I'm not paying him on the rookie scale, but I'm paying him 30 plus million a year. It'll be 40 plus million. You know, can I even build a team that has success? Like, is he that good? That's like the zone that I never want to be in. And with Tua, at least you know, it will be one or the other. He will either be unbelievably good or, you know, people will be correct that the injuries will sink his career or whatever. But he will

not be, I think, like, mediocre or decent or somewhere in the middle. And I actually like that. I've never heard the in-defense-buss steak. I've never heard the pro. You know, you want to take Johnny Mansell. So, you know, a few years later, you can get Baker-Mayfields and then, you know, set up for the 2022 draft if Baker-Bainfield doesn't work out. I've never heard in-defense busts. I guess I just think that it's not really in-defense a bus. Obviously, you'd rather have a player who can contribute than one who's off your roster in a few seasons. but it's more the defense of like a guy completely busing and a guy being mediocre are actually not that different.

It goes back to that argument about, you know, that sort of mid-tier of NFL teams that finish, you know, in between six and ten and eight and eight seemingly every season. Right. You don't want that as that, but as a quarterback. You're trying to get the quarterback who can like will your squad to 10 or 11 wins every year at least, even if you don't have the best guys around him, you don't want the quarterback who it's like, you need the stars to align just so that you win 11 games, right? And there are some teams right now who have built their entire rosters around quarterbacks where it's like the

stars have to align just for them to be in contention or at the fringes of being in contention. And I hate that. That's more frustrating to me than the team without any real quarterback to build around that at least has the potential of drafting the next guy or, or, you know, being at the top of the draft and having a future. Like, that's way more exciting to me. These are the thoughts of a Los Angeles Rams fan. Yeah, I know. I'm really coming at this a lot of Jared Gough thoughts. of Jared Gough resentment. You've just been watching Jared Gough and thinking, God, I wish this guy sucked more. Well, there's like an argument that's like, I don't know, maybe the bears are better off with Mitchell Trabisky because at least they can just move on

instead of paying the guy like $35 million a year. And now, your roster is capped out and you're just done, you're done. And I've- Dude, general managers across the, across the league are tuning into this podcast and tried to boost you as like the potential, the guy who could save their job by saying that actually it was good to drive someone who sucked as much as Mitch Jermisky. I know you're not saying it's good, but I just love this, this take that, uh, that, you know, you're better off.

you're better off just having someone you know is trash. No, I like it. And, you know, so I have a funny feeling that we're going to see a lot of people try to argue their way out of making bad picks this year because it was the weird draft. Yes, they'll say that, oh, you know, they didn't get to do their full evaluation or whatever. And when Tua is, you know, being named to all pro teams and winning VPs and stuff, they'll be like, oh, yeah, you know, well, we would have drafted him if we had known. And it's like, yeah, sure, guys. There's always a lot of that revisionism every draft year.

And maybe Tua will suck and it'll be somebody else. It'll be, oh, they knew about Jordan Love or something, even though I don't think either of us are high on Jordan Love. But whoever comes out to be awesome in this draft, that'll be the one that all the GMs are like, oh, yeah, we were going to. The defining story of this year is going to be well. We only were able to go off the measurables, and we saw, you know, Jordan Love because he had all those measurables.

and we weren't able to get that pro-day experience with Tua. We weren't able to sit down with him. We weren't able to smell him. And if we'd been able to smell Tua, we would have known that he had the smell of a winner. But we weren't, so we went with Jordan Love and, you know, just give us another chance. The next time we get our olfactory glands pointed at a quarterback prospect,

to hit it. But you can't really blame us for the pandemic draft 2020. Right. I still, you know, pandemic or no pandemic, I'm just a very aggressive person when it comes to something like the draft. And Tua fits with that. You know, one of the best college players ever. I think he's just shown so much potential that can translate over to the pros. You know, I'm not a scout or anything, but it doesn't take a lot to watch Tua play and to be like, wow, this dude is unbelievable. And I'm totally fine with the risk, the injury risk, basically any risk there, because I just think that a bust versus an OK player is not as big as the gulf between an OK player and an elite player. That's what you really want. You're looking for elite elite players.

So just draft for upside. That's basically my take. If it weren't for the injuries, I'd be like Tua overboro. Wow. I think, I mean, it's, it's, Tua was incredible from the. very moment, he played football for the first time. He played college football for the first time. Won a national championship in basically his very first game. Joe Burrow had a little bit more of a developmental curve, by which I mean he was very mediocre for the first three years. He played

college football. And Tua has just been great all the time. And he's got the best statistics of any quarterback ever. Then Joe Burrow had the best single individual season. It's a tough call, whether you want the best career of any quarterback ever or the best individual year of any quarterback ever. But I like to a more, but I get the injury situation. It is, I think, under-explored a little bit that Joe Burrow basically was kind of not a great quarterback and then just exploded and had an unbelievable year last year. And he rose all the way up to now being basically the lock for the number one pick. and I am really fascinated to see how that plays out.

I haven't even really seen like revisionism of that 2018 season where he, I think he threw 16 touchdowns, something like that. I haven't even seen people say actually he was kind of a hidden gem and we didn't realize it. It was just a total complete transformation of almost all of his capabilities overnight, which is weird and awesome and makes me think, you know, oh, well, he was at a different scheme. he was in a better scheme.

But also I'm like, huh, we're really putting a lot of faith in the best season of all time, which I guess is an okay thing to put a lot of faith in. It's a lot better than Jordan Love, who played one, like, good year, and then one very bad year, and people are somehow valuating the good year over that. Right. And they come in the opposite order for love. It's like two years ago he was good. Then he regresses.

I don't think there's, like, any real precedent for, a Joe Burrow type situation where the guy was he was playing he was not very good and then suddenly he just has one of the best seasons ever and he shoots up all the draft boards and we're all just accepting it there's just been nothing like it and I don't even think it's wrong like I think that the Bengals will be right to saying him at number one I wouldn't have anyone above him just because of what he showed last year and it's like well you know what you've done recently is the part of the sample that we should weigh most heavily on. But it is so weird. There's just no precedent. We already know that you endorse prospects who could bust. Right. That too.

So if he goes back to playing like it's 2018 all of a sudden, Riley's fine with it and still thinks the fangles made the right decision. They're setting themselves up for 2023. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like you're laughing me a little bit, but why not? I mean, in a few years, they can be in position to draft a quarterback again if Burrow doesn't work out. Well, I mean, what's wrong with that? Okay. Okay. The Bengals are drafting Joe Barrow who's the best quarterback and also doomed. What's next? I didn't expect this to become like a shadow episode of the hottest take, but I guess we're there now.

This is my hottest take. Draft busts or draft guys who are likely to bust or something. I'm not sure you can misconstrue this, but just draft for upside. Take risks. I guess that's my take. Yeah, risks are good. And a lot of NFL teams are going to be taking that this year because, you know, even though they got to do the NFL combine in February, like the last mass gathering of people that happened in society was the NFL combine. And even though they have like four years of college tape on everyone, general managers have still been kind of thrown into the lurch by the fact that they were not allowed to do in-person interviews in the last couple months.

They were not allowed to go to pro days. They are freaking out about this. They don't know how to use computers, that they're all kind of worried about this draft, this very strange draft. Before we move on, let's take a quick break. As the novel coronavirus pandemic escalates in the U.S., public health officials are encouraging those who are experiencing signs or symptoms of COVID-19, such as coughing or fever, to seek medical guidance remotely. If you or a loved one are feeling sick or are just feeling worried, there's a way to get help without leaving home. Roe is offering free telehealth services for people seeking guidance and information on COVID-19. The service is available free of charge in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

Rowe's free online assessment will help determine if you are at risk, and, if appropriate, Rowe will connect you with a medical provider for a free consultation. The assessment was designed by doctors and infectious disease experts and is based on guidelines from the CDC and WHO. Visit Rowe.co-slash-coronavirus. your phone or laptop to complete a free online assessment or just learn more. That's RO.co.co. If you're worried that you may be experiencing symptoms, go to row.com slash coronavirus to start your free assessment today. During the NFL draft, place your bets with Fandul's sportsbook. They're America's number one online sportsbook for a reason. Legal, secure, have all the bets you could want,

and easy to use app, promotions every day, and you get your cash fast when you win. And Fan Duels Sportsbook has a special offer for all new users. Bet up to $25 and get plus 200 odds on Joe Burrow being the first overall pick of the draft. Plus 200 odds on Joe Burrow being the first overall pick. That seems like the best value bet you can probably make on the NFL draft, at least to me, because I think it's like a 99% chance he is the number one overall pick. So we'll see what happens, but that's sounding very good. Download the FanDual Sportsbook app from the Iowa.

app store or visit fandul.com slash Android and sign up with promo code draft one to bet up to $25 on Joe Burrow to go first overall at plus 200. That's fanduel.com slash Android promo code draft one. You must be 21 years or older, present in New Jersey, Indiana or West Virginia. First online wager only. Offer limited to the first 500 participants. You must wager on designated boost market max bonus of $50. promo code. required. If you have a gambling problem, call 1-800 gambler or in West Virginia, visit www.1-800 gambler.net or in Indiana, call 1-800-9 with it. Roger, like what else, just as far as like picks and teams and I guess like stuff that is

more normally strange in the draft, what else did you have an eye on? I think that the team that's most right for something bad happening. And, you know, call me, I'm not really coming out of left field here, but I just am so excited to find out what the New York Giants are going to do. I think Dave Gettlement is one of the least equipped people in the world for this exact moment. He's sitting in his home with, like, we keep seeing all these pictures of general manager setups, and they have like 19 screens in front of them

and like they've got this massive setup and they've got IT technicians coming in and out of their houses to make sure everything's perfect and then you see the picture of Dave Geddeman's home and he just has a laptop and several enormous binders and that's all he's got

I just cannot wait he has spent the entire pre-draft saying that he's like been unable to physically touch the prospects. And this is someone who, even with every piece of information at his feet, has made the two of the stranger decisions the last two drafts. And I feel like the Giants are going to trade out of the four spot, but I could also just, you know, I think the world is Dave Gettlebid's, you know, playground and I have no idea what he will do.

Besides, probably fail to mute his audio while talking to the other 31. Yes, he's going to have a trade request where he's on the phone with another team that's just being streamed live on ESPN and it will be glorious. If you had to like mean girls, one general manager and get them like on a conference call where they don't realize they're talking to 30 other general managers, Gettleman's my number one. Absolutely. There was that report the other day that the Giants are infatuated with Justin Herbert that I think is one of the more obvious smoke screens. That was the Giants, right? Yeah, they said the Giants are like, they've been studying up on Herbert after, you know, they, you know, I could see him liking Herbert. But yeah, it seems like they're just trying to scare teams into thinking if you don't trade up with the Giants. you know, Herbert will be on. Can't imagine. Can't imagine that they take Herbert or even considering it.

This is not a Josh Rosen, Kyler Murray Cardinals type situation in New York. I think that they are set with Daniel Jones for at least next year, maybe a year after that. And I don't know. I thought that that report was like comical and how obvious the smokescreen was. This guy's an innovator. You know, you put Daniel Jones back there. You put Justin Herbert and Sequin in the same backfield. You've got a tall quarterback, you've got a slightly taller quarterback, who knows what they do. Either one of them could throw an inaccurate pass to like Sterling Shepard. And when that photo came out of Herbert, you know, or of, sorry, of Dave Gettelman sitting at his desk with a laptop in front of them and with all of these different binders and, you know, contrasted with like, they had the 49ers set up and

they had like literally like seven TVs and computers and stuff in front of them, I was hoping my first reaction was to zoom in on everything and see if they'd accidentally tweeted out Gettleman's Big Board because this happened with the magic a few years ago and there was also the Kings with Vladi Divak. They tweeted out a photo once where behind Vladi was written in whiteboard marker at his desk. It was like Aiton and then Bagley and then Donchich and then they had like the record for the team too and it's like oh my God, teams sometimes do this where they just snap a photo and they tweet it out. And I'm hoping we still have a little bit of time left that we get one of those where somebody is like, here's the war room. And then in the

background, you can just see that they have, you know, like Herbert and then like love and then two are something and we'll all be able to make fun of them. And it'll be just amazing. I actually feel like the giants were probably saved by this because, yeah, you're right. That's a thing that happens in a war room with a whiteboard. Whereas when Dave Gettleman has everything stored on his Winovo think pad, you know, know, we're not going to get that glimpse. You know, he's, he's just, I think they might have been saved in that regard. The Kings one was, it was accurate, right?

Like, they actually, it showed that they liked Bagley and everyone was like, why would they take Bagley? And then they took Bagley. It was after the draft, I believe. So it could. It was after the draft got it. What it confirmed, which is very painful for Kings fans, which I'm a Kings fan, it was that Donchich was the guy who they liked third right after Bagley.

And it was like, oh, my God. They actually might be kind of saved because these guys are going to be in their own homes, unless they're like, you know, 12-year-old's child comes up and starts like, you know, filming them for TikTok. They're going to have a little bit more control, actually, over what's being broadcast out because it's just going to be like their own camera filming them. There's not going to be like a camera crew there.

there's not going to be like this social media person tweeting for their team account will not be taking pictures of them. So they might be safe on that regard. But still, I feel like the opportunity for these middle-aged men to have a technological mishap, they don't seem like the NFL was very slow to just even integrate like the idea of using statistics to decide who to draft. I feel like there will be some technological mishaps. I hope that there are. I'm actually kind of starting to fall into the belief that it might just run a little bit more smoothly than we're expecting and that nothing happens.

But I really hope that the draft stops at least once. I hope that Roger Goodell gets up there and, or he doesn't get up anywhere. I don't think. I guess he'll just be on his laptop or something. but he forgets to unmute as he's calling somebody's name or I really, really want something like that. But I almost like, if we were to bet on like what kind of technical glitches there would be, I'd probably actually be betting that there won't be very many.

And that saddens me. I don't know. I think they're going to come together and it's sort of going to be like, ah, man, this wasn't as much of a disaster as I hoped. But I do hope it's a disaster. Here's what's going to happen. So all of the NFL general managers, ESPN reported out what's going to happen. All of the general managers are going to be on a conference call together, on a Microsoft Teams meeting. However, presumably those general managers are also going to be talking to their own teams,

you know, like to the other people they make decisions with. Right. So they're going to have multiple lines going on at once. This is where it gets really thorny. I just cannot imagine they make it through three days of the draft where none of the general managers forget to mute the NFL, the conference call with the other general managers, and accidentally tell every general manager in the league, like, who they're thinking about taking. I refuse to believe that they can make it through 250 picks without one general manager forgetting to hit the mute button. I forget to hit the mute button, like, just on, like, zooms with my friends and accidentally broadcast, like, my dogs barking or, like, me talking to my girlfriend. And,

this is going to be a three-day marathon of 50-year-old guys trying to figure 11 things out at once, trying to put together trades, trying to reassess their draft boards after three rounds. Someone's going to forget that mute button, and they will tell the entire world, either ESPN or the other 31 general managers of the league. I'm not sure which is worse.

All of their plans. And we'll find out about it later. Yeah, I hope you're right. You know, you've actually kind of convinced me here a little bit. I think that that is a lot to juggle. I could see myself messing that up. And if I can see myself messing it up, then I feel like, you know, with 32 GMs, one of them is going to get it wrong. Yeah, it's just when like I feel like in their normal habitat, there are so many people there to help out an NFL coach, an NFL general manager. They have a multi- multi-billion dollar organizations worth of underlings at their disposal. And now they are in their bedrooms. They are in their, you know, in the seventh room of their house, which they forgot existed. And in the past two weeks, they've had someone throw a router in there. And left to their own devices, I think they will struggle with those devices. I feel like what they need to do, probably what each gym needs to do is almost have two completely separate rooms.

basically for each of these. It's like, okay, one of them is the room where I report the actual pick to Goodell to NFL HQ. And the other room is where I have my big board and I have the phone line with our scouts and our draft team. And that way, I have to physically move locations and not even just hit a mute button in order to make sure that I don't ever screw this up. There are apparently several contingency plans. Like they said each team has three people who we're allowed to make the pick in case the technology goes out at the first person. Like if the internet dies at the first person, we've already had a few reports that GMs think that their kids are eating up all their

bandwidth by streaming movies and stuff like that. So yeah, we also have a report that the Detroit Lions will have an IT guy sitting in a Winnebago in the general manager's driveway. which I think is my favorite detail of this. That's fantastic. Of the draft so far. They'll just, they have a guy just sitting out there in a car waiting for something to screw up in a Winnebago.

This Adam Schaefter reports, he will go home every night and then return to the RV when the draft resumes. The bandwidth thing is also really real. All we need is the kid of one of these general managers to decide actually he is going to play Fortnite, even though, like, mom and dad told him no. And once he gets on there, then, you know, the connection for the conference call or the Zoom meeting or whatever will just go kaput. And, you know, this general manager will be cut off from his draft squad or from Goodell or whoever. I mean, we've had that happen at the ringer with some of just our regular Zoom calls.

And this is going to be bigger than that because there's going to be 32 people. Who is playing Fortnite? The kids. The kids are playing it. Oh, there we go. I think you just threw in that random noise of a water bottle dropping just to add to the authenticity of how difficult this is going to be. Is that a water bottle? Yeah, there's going to be stuff like that too.

Yes, that was my water bottle. I accidentally just hit it. Yeah, there'll be a lot of awkward stuff like that too. And unlike on a podcast where normally we could edit something like that out, except right now it's part of our bit, you know, they won't be able to edit that out if it's on a live conference call or whatever, which won't be broadcast necessarily at ESPN, but hopefully we find out about it later. I just want to know about every single mistake that happens. We've had teams, you know, not often, but we've had teams miss the clock with no extenuating

circumstances. It hasn't happened since 2003, but we've had teams failed to get a picket. Like when they were doing something they've done every year in the same place they were with the same setup they always have, someone is going to take more than 10 minutes to make a picket. Especially, I mean, it'll be lower profile, but in those later rounds when the clock is shorter, you know, and they only have a couple minutes to figure out all this stuff. And, you know, someone's line goes dead and do we wait for them to pick up? It'll happen. I'm predicting an over under three and a half clock stoppages over the 250 picks. See, this is where I'm saying I would take the under, but I really hope it's the over. I would be happy if we just get one. If we get any clock stoppage at all, especially if it happens in the first round or near the beginning of the draft. Oh my gosh, that would just be gold for me.

You're the first person ever for just like nothing to happen. We're talking about a technical difficulties delay. No, but it'll be hilarious. Oh, my, like it'll be on Twitter and it'll be on the broadcast. They won't know what to do. It'll just be a scramp.

Everyone will just be sitting and chilling. There'll be jokes. There'll probably be a lot of people making the same joke. Like, I don't know what the, you know, that's Twitter. That's been Twitter for the last, you know, know 15 years. It'll be prime fodder for like overworked Twitter jokes. Yeah, I mean, great stuff. All right. Let's, uh, what else is there that we think teams are going to mess up? I have one.

I kind of think that there someone's going to take a running back in the first round and there might even be multiple running backs that go in the first round. And I think that the evidence is so clear over the past few years, maybe even the past decade, that doing that is a huge mistake. because even if they're good, you then have to pay them because you've taken them in the first round. You've probably used them as a workhorse back. You know, your fans have bought their jerseys. They're kind of a star on your team. They're making pro bowls and stuff.

And so somebody is going to take a Jonathan Taylor or J.K. Dobbins or J.K. Dobbins or J. And it's like, this could not be more clear. Just don't do that. Have a committee backfield. Don't commit to one guy. Otherwise, you end up with Todd Gurley. or David Johnson or a Leveon-Bell situation or whatever, but you just don't want to pay a running back,

and the best way to not pay a running back is not draft one highly. And I think that's going to happen. But to go back to your earlier point, no one, you always move on from a running back after that first contract. So it's like you're automatically drafting a QB bust, which in your opinion is a great thing to do.

Well, I'm just going to keep coming back to that. I'm sorry. If you're able to move on, if you're able to do the Melvin Gordon Leveon-Bell thing, but the downside to that is you kind of look bad as an organization. When people like Levi-on-Bel or they like Melvin-Gordon and they've invested in their careers, your fans have. You don't want to be seen as the big bad, rich NFL team that's like, I'm not going to pay the guy, even if you know that's best for your roster management.

And the running backs aren't doing anything wrong by hoping that they get paid as much as possible when their careers are so short and they're taking a beating, right? Like, they deserve to get paid. It's just a tricky situation. And what ends up happening is sometimes you say, you know, you're the Rams and you're like, we're going all in for the Super Bowl. We need this locker room to commit. And we think Gurley's really good and might be the exception at the running back position.

We're going to give him a huge contract. And then the Rams have to just cut Gurley. And obviously there's a situation there with his knee and everything. But it does fall into a pattern of a lot of running backs who've gotten contracts, not even being on the team for very long after that, and the team basically immediately regretting that contract. I honestly think we're going to be kind of safe from that this year because we've got this draft that's got a couple of great quarterbacks up top.

People are saying it's one of the best wide receiver drafts of all time. Chase Young is like this otherworldly prospect, and he might go third or something if someone trades up to take a quarterback. You know, second, like, I don't think there's going to be that impetus to take these sort of, they're not great running backs. No one's saying that any, that Swift or Taylor is like a historic prospect.

I think they'll kind of be saved for themselves on that draft. They're not, they're not Sequin Barclay, yeah. I mean, that's true. Yeah, yeah. So no one's, like, the sort of desire to make that happen is a little bit less with,

with this particular batch of prospects. So, but there's still someone who might be in that, like, 20 to 30 range that's like, you know what I want. I want DeAndre Swift, and that doesn't seem like a great idea to me. Right. I think one of those guys ends up being, I don't know, not a Sequan Barkley type or even a Todd Gurley type, but more of maybe a Josh Jacobs type, who guess what? If the Raiders keep using him the way they did in his rookie season, they'll have to pay Josh Jacobs, too.

And it'll be another one of these tricky situations that you kind of just don't want to find your franchise in. I don't know. I guess my other take here is I never. really want to pay a running back if I'm managing a roster. And the way that you don't do that is you just never draft one before like the third round or something. Yeah. The third round is where they is the sweet spot, I think. You draft two of them with opposite skill sets. You make sure neither of them ever get the great workload. I feel like Mr. Burns right now. It's like, oh, here's my like diabolical plan to never pay the guys who are playing for me. But the running back, big contract is kind of one of the worst contracts in the NFL right now for the teams who feel

like they have to do that. I mean, look at like the Jaguars with Leonard Fernette. They can't even like give him away. And I guess that's one of the situations where they might actually be able to not pay him and not feel pressured into paying him because they're rebuilding. What if you could get Bill O'Brien to trade you, DeAndre Hopkins? Well, that's the other, yeah, that's the other scenario. You trade Leonard Fernet for Deshaun Watson straight up. In fact, you ask the Texans to also throwing a pick in there because why not? And maybe that'll work for you. Yeah. Bill O'Brien

has become the wilds card of literally every moment in the NFL season. There's never a time when Bill O'Brien might not trade someone for, you know, dump draft picks, just decided a player who everyone else has decided

has kind of moved on. No one was big on David Johnson. And anyway, you never know what's coming for Bill O'Brien. Yeah, it's too bad that the Texans don't have a number one pick in this draft because I would just love to see what the hell they would manage to do with it. I mean, David Johnson, the Cardinals, despite paying him all that money, just stopped using him last year because they realized he was ineffective. I mean, he's basically done to trade him for DeAndre Hopkins. That was like indefensibly bad.

At least it seems on the outset, unless something really wild happens with those players that we're just not seeing right now. I can't defend the process of that trade whatsoever. Yeah, Bill O'Brien has, you know, he's the coach, he's the general manager. He's the good thing is he might be okay in this draft because I feel like he's eliminated every single other member of the Texans brain trust. Every single member of the Houston Texans organization has been fired and replaced with Bill O'Brien. So he doesn't really need to converse with anyone.

He doesn't need to be in a war room. Right. He might be their IT guy at this point after firing, after usurping the general manager role. So this actually could be a fine draft for him. Unfortunately, no first round picks. I've seen some people say this is the draft where you want to kind of get rid of the picks because of the uncertainty. I honestly feel like you almost don't want to have draft picks next year either because of the uncertainty around the upcoming college football season and who knows what else is going to happen. Bill O'Brien,

trading away all these picks really, really was a visionary. He was ahead of the curve, yeah. So they have picked 40 years. He set himself up. Yeah, they traded back in, you know, smart move, get rid of DeAndre Hopkins, get yourself the 40th pick. That seems like a fair trade. But yeah, he eliminated the need to have person-to-person interaction and he eliminated the two most in certain draft picks of all time, you know, he's golden. Yeah, I wish that they had one of their original first round picks or they were up there in there somewhere because I feel like that's a wild card. You know, we talked about David Gettleman possibly being on mute or off of mute or having

some kind of tech issue. But Bill O'Brien's probably up there too as somebody you'll have something that we'll be talking about after this draft. He's safe. He's all by him. He's he's he's he's. He's all by himself. He'll be fine. So what else could happen that's weird that we haven't talked about yet?

I'm sure you saw that they are sending 32 hats to every single player who can be on the broadcast, which was like 58 players. It works out to almost 2,000 hats. It feels kind of ridiculous to me. Just a massive waste of hats of like perfect. Because I feel like at the actual NFL draft, they don't need to stock up every single hat for every single person. I feel like there's just a hat guy who keeps like a regular stash of hats. Right. You know, there's no chance that all 50 players get drafted by the same team. I think the Browns were trying that a couple years ago to get all 58 of the top picks

in the draft under Sashi. But yeah, no, there's a waste of hats. I do feel like this will be Roger Goodell's best draft of all time because there's no live audience. He won't get booed. Although, I don't know. I wonder if they'll do something about that. He'll probably make some joke about it.

He's kind of self-aware about that stuff. Is he? Your take on Roger Goodell is self-aware? Well, he's played into like the booing before, I believe. Hasn't he kind of been like, oh, you know, there it is. Like, didn't he do one year where he kind of like signaled for people to turn it up at him. I don't know. I think he's just a little bit, like he understands that he's the villain. That's what he's paid to be. He's paid to just take the blame for everything

that the 32 owners wants to do. It still seems like it upsets him a little bit. It is always funny like that, you know, this Super Bowl every year is this great moment and he only comes out when a team has just won the championship and all of the fans of that team are the only people left in the stands and they're having the best moment of their lives and he comes out and they still boo him. And this is really his chance to shine. He's in his basement. No one is mad at him. Well, people are mad at him, but just like in the same way we're always mad at him, just like online. And we can't break through the glass into his presumably very nice basement. I do sort of, this is going to allow us to see what sort of basement you can buy by being

a professional scapegoat. And I assume it's going to be incredible. Yeah, a very nice basement. I'm sure they've set up like a soundstage there. I wonder if Robb's a podium or something, I mean, like the whole deal. I'm hoping for a podium. But, you know, I just feel like he's going to enjoy this moment. Is there anything else that we need to talk about to preview just how bizarre these next few days will be? It's, I do feel like as much as we're hyping up how bizarre it is,

It's already such a fraud process. There's so much evidence available on which football players are good. They play football for years, and we have all of the tapes of it. And we can break down those tapes. We can analyze the statistics in very great detail. You can find out everything you need to know about how good the football players are by watching them play football. And this will be either the draft that either proves that all of this pre-draft stuff kind of doesn't change a lot because we already have so much evidence available. Or they'll just say it was a fluke that they drafted someone bad because of how weird it was.

And that's probably what's going to happen and they'll probably keep their jobs. Right. It's probably that we underrate just how weird the draft is every year, how weird this whole. processes, how much of it really hasn't been updated or modernized or is in line with, I don't know, recent evidence, I guess you would say. It seems like in so many fields right now we're finding out what you're capable of doing from home. We are sitting in different apartments podcasting right now.

It's possible. And yet this will somehow be proven as like evidence that all of the, all of the pre-drafts in-person contact is absolutely mandatory because otherwise we'll draft Jordan Love. And whatever happens, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if a few years out, they're like, oh, this was the flukiest draft ever because so-and-so in the fifth round became a pro-bowl player or whatever. Yeah, we just weren't able to get to that pro day for that guy who played at some Division 1A school.

Yeah, this undrafted guy became a star. Yeah, we just had no idea. That happens every year. That happens every year because there's just too much. There's too many variables and nobody knows what's going to happen. The draft is a crapshoot. It will be this year. It will be in future years.

It has been in past years. I think it was Robert Klemko who did a story about how he went to Austin Eccler's pro day and no one knew who he was. And then he put up these crazy numbers that pro day. And he still goes undrafted. But like that's when people noticed that he, a prospect at a school, people weren't particularly watching turned out to have the physical attributes you might need of the NFL. And those are probably the players who are going to be most hurt by the lack of that stuff.

The guys who didn't get watched on TV, who didn't get those combine invites. And yes, it will be blamed on the fact that they just didn't do a good job scouting because the stats are there. The tape is there. It's just they're going to end up saying it was because we didn't get to talk to them in April and smell them and touch them. That's a Dave Gettleman quote, by the way. I keep on bringing up the smelling and the touch. that's the thing that Dave Gettleman actually said is that he's upset that he can't smell and touch the players.

It's the smell that always gets to me. Somehow I don't think that that's what makes the difference between a successful NFL player and an unsuccessful one is how they smell. Have you ever shown Daniel Jones? True, you're right. I don't actually know for sure. You know nothing. You're not a general manager. You couldn't smell the difference between a first rounder and a fifth rounder. I couldn't. It's true.

I think that's a pretty good note to end it on. I think we're running out of time here. Roger, this is a pleasure. I think we'll be back again after the draft to recap any weirdness that happens. Hopefully it's a lot of weirdness. It's, I, well, even if everything goes normal, just the fact that everyone has to present it in this strange way is going to be unique. And we'll get to find out whether they find a way to pipe in booze to Roger Goodell's basement.

I'm sure they have that figured out. All right. This has been The Ringer NFL show. Thank you for listening. I'm Riley McTee. That's Roger Sherman. We'll see you.