The Ringer NFL Show - 'GM Street’ — Tales From the Draft War Room With Mike Lombardi (Ep. 102)

Episode Date: April 26, 2017

The Ringer's Mike Lombardi and Tate Frazier discuss Mitchell Trubisky's future (02:00), the NFL draft experience before cellphones (05:00), and trading down to buy time (08:00). Then Lombardi shares a few draft stories from his days working with Al Davis (12:00) and Bill Belichick (24:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Buying tickets to sports and concerts can be complicated and confusing, but there is a better, simpler way to buy. With Seekekek is the smartest, easiest way to get tickets to live events. With Seekek's seamless mobile experience, you can buy and sell tickets in just two taps, Seatgeek helps you find the best seats at the best prices fully guaranteed. There's nothing quite like seeing your favorite team or musician in person, and Seat Geek will get you closer to the action for a great value. I have the Seatgeek app on my phone. I've had it for quite some time, and it's by far.

the easiest way I found to shop for tickets. I can be anywhere and with just a few taps. That's right. Only two taps, usually. I can instantly find seats. I actually just use the Seat Geek app to buy tickets to Chance the Rapper later this year. So Seat Geek, thanks for that. Seat Geek is designed to make your ticket

buying experience easier than ever. Seek saves you time and money by searching multiple ticket sites to compare prices and find you amazing deals. And to get you the most bang for your bucks, Seat Geek grades every ticket based on value to help you immediately identify the best seats that fit your budget.

Plus, every purchase is fully guaranteed so you can shop for tickets on Seat Geek with confidence. Make Seat Geek your go-to app for finding the best deals on every type of ticket from sports and concerts to comedy and theater. Best of all, my listeners, get $20 off their first Seat Geek purchase. Just download the Seat Geek app and enter promo code Ringer NFL today. That's promo code R-I-N-G-R-N-F-L for $20 off your first Seat-E-E-E-E-R-E-E-L-F-L for $20. geek purchase. Welcome to GM Street. I'm Tate Frazier and I'm sitting across from Mike Lombardi. Lombardi, how are you? I'm great, Tate. It's like Christmas. We've got draft week. I mean,

what could be better, right? Yeah, it's like I need Kevin Costner come out here. I feel like draft days on the horizon. All good things are ahead. The draft is on Thursday. We're going to talk about a lot of draft stuff today. It's going to be pretty much everything that we cover. We're going to do some draft stories from you. You're going to give us a little bit of behind-the-scenes stuff that happens in the war room. You're going to give us a breakdown. of why you wanted to draft Sebastian Janakowski in the first round in 2000, all types of stuff. But first we're going to hit some NFL news and notes around the draft. The Cleveland Browns have a problem.

And they've had this problem for since 1999, the franchise came back. They've had 26 quarterback. So they've had a quarterback problem for quite some time. Mitch Trubiskey, according to Mary Kay Cabot, is still the option to be a top pick for the Cleveland Browns to be the number one overall pick. Hugh Jackson has pretty much come out and said that Miles, Garrett is his guy as the top spot. If the Cleveland Browns

do go out and select Mitch Trubisky, Mitchell Trubisky as number one overall pick, what is the domino effect to that? What does that lead to? Well, you know, San Francisco's trying to trade their pick. Nobody knows what San Francisco is going to try to do. And if Cleveland is

going to buy the fact that San Francisco would pick Trubisky, which I don't buy into it all, okay, and they're going to go down that road, then San Francisco ends up with miles Garrett, a dominant defensive player, who could be a dominant defensive player. He's the best player in the draft. I think everybody acknowledges

when you put on the tape, now he had a bad ankle of senior season. When you watch the tape of this player, there's moments of lapse. I wrote about it in my column where you have that Columbo question is, you know, like it just bothers you that he doesn't play all the time. However, that being said, he has rare talent and he can come

off the edge, something Cleveland needs desperately. Cleveland needs a quarterback desperately. They also have the 12th pick. To me, I think there's a sense of, there's a lot of disagreement going on within the Cleveland organization. We know Hugh Jackson, who you would think would want the quarterback. Right. This is an offensive guy.

Right. But he doesn't want the quarterback. He wants the defensive player. Whereas Sashi Brown, who is the general manager, really no background in personnel. Sassie Brown was a lawyer, was hired. I was in Cleveland when he was there. He came in. He was a lawyer.

He's never been in the football background. This is truly analytical. And I'm not sure the analytics support Trubisky. There's only 13 games to really go by. But for the desperation of what they're looking for at quarterback, they're willing to do this. I just don't. People said, Oh, Lombardi, you're just bitter because you got fired from Cleveland.

You're putting out this rumor. I'm not putting the rumor right. Everybody talks about it in the league. They actually think they're going to pick Trubisky. I think it'll be a huge mistake. And I think it'll be horrible for Trubisky because he comes in as the golden child. And he's not really worth the pick. It'd be a lot better for them to trade up from 12 to go get Tribisky and have Garrett.

Then have Trubisky and say, who else are you going to pick a 12 and hope you turn out. It won't work. Yeah, I think that they are getting lost in the story. line. So Mitchell Drabiski has come out and said that his goal, his dream in life, like the make a wish of Ms. Trubisky as a kid was to fix the revolving doors problem of quarterback at the Cleveland Browns. He couldn't fix a revolving door problem at your own alma mater. I mean, what the hell are you talking about? He didn't fix it there. And that's the thing. But I think the problem with Cleveland is they're buying into the storyline of here's this Cleveland kid that's coming from Mentor, Ohio, that's going to come in and save the franchise. and it all sounds good in principle, but the end of the day,

Mitch is a very raw, talented kid and is more... They put Mitch in the lineup as a rookie. They put him in there. It will not be pretty. No. You thought RG3 was bad last year? It will not be good. Even though they have a really good offensive...

That's the best part of their team is their offensive line, so they should be able to protect them. But it's not going to be pretty. It's going to get ugly. I just think Cleveland is panicking. I'm under the impression that Sashi and the ownership, they really want to have a quarterback. But if they wanted this quarterback,

You have to ask yourself, why didn't they just pick Carson once last year? Yep. You know, and then the other problem they have is they have all these draft picks. They're not all going to make the team. Like, you can't have all these, you can't be that young of a team where you have 50 draft picks on your team. You've got to have some veteran guys in there. I just don't understand it. And I reluctant to talk about it as much because people think there's an agenda.

There's no agenda for me. I mean, I think it's really clear. I'd pick Miles Garrett. I think everybody else in the league picked Miles Garrett. And then from there, find the quarterback that you like. And look, if Trubisky goes one, I think most people in the league will be shocked, then a 49ers will be the beneficiary. And that was sort of the other thing that Mary Kay Cabot in the same piece came out.

She said that the Jets were very interested in Ms. Trubisky and the 49ers are very interested in Ms. Trubisky. And it's sort of a way to appeal to the fact that they should take Mitch, number one, because they would lose them if they don't take him. But you're saying that's completely debunk because there's no way the 40. 49ers are trying to trade back, so why would they jump on Trubiski? Yeah, I think the 49ers, you know, they signed Brian Hoare, they sign Matt Barkley. Yeah. I think Kyle Shanahan has been around where they drafted Matt Schaub down in Houston.

I think he understands that he can develop a quarterback. So why would I, like, just like when people have Fournette being the second pick overall in the draft, I just don't see that. Because Kyle Shanahan grew up in a family that we draft running backs in the fifth and sixth round. I think he thinks he can get a quarterback that he can do those things. Does Trubisky fit what he does? Yeah, he does. But I'm not sure that that's really what the agenda he's. here is I think San Francisco is trying to make sure they get the most value for the pick.

And if the Browns believe the Jets are going to pick a quarterback, I think they're wrong. I think the Jets aren't going to pick a quarterback. I think the Jets have some affection for Christian Hakenberg, and I think they're going to find out whether he can play or not. Yep. And the Jets have the six picks, so we will see what they do. Lombardi, I think what we're going to do this week, we want to talk about draft stories and just the draft experience in general. You've been there. You've been through it all pretty much.

I mean, I was going back through. So, 1987, you were a scout, right, with the Cleveland Browns. I started, yeah, I was, actually, I started 84 and I was a scout in 87 with the Browns. Yeah, I sure was. I was at the 49er draft room that year. Okay. So I did that draft. That was a draft.

That was the draft where we drafted 87. We drafted a kid from Clemson named Terrence Flagler, Harris Barton. We had two first round picks, yeah. The way I'm going with this is I'm just going to take those examples as you've been through and sort of try to tie it back to the modern draft in 20. Got it. So a perfect example, 1987. You're in the draft room. You have two first round picks.

Another team that has two first round picks this year. The Cleveland Brown is a team we were just talking about. You know, you have one in 12. That year, do you remember the picks that you had? We were in the, you know, we made the playoffs. There was 28 teams in the league. So we made the playoffs. I think we were like 17 and 21.

I mean, we were the, but the one thing about that draft, it was, this is now. We had no cell phones back. Yeah. Okay. I mean, this is before you're born. So we would always have to call. call the kid on the phone to see if he was alive. There's no internet.

We'll make sure everything was good, right? Yes. So Coach Walsh tells me, go get Roger Vick, which is a runnerback from Texas Tech on the phone. Because we're going to pick him with this pick. So I go back to my office. I go back to the room and I style Roger Vicks and the phone's busy, phones busy, phones busy, and I come back in the room and I say, coach, Roger Vick's lines is busy. And then the next thing you know, we see the TV say, the New York.

Jet selects Roger Vick. Yeah. And then we pick Harris Barton from your school, from North Carolina, and then we pick Flagler, a running back from Clemson. And this is really kind of ties in with Mitchell Tribeschi a little bit. And then that's when we picked Flagler, who had one year of success at college. He was a one-year wonder. And then Walsh, from that point on, always said, because Flagler was a bust.

I mean, we blew it with Flagler on the pick. And he just said, hey, look, we'll take the one-year player and look forward. Don't take the one-year player and look back. Take the one-year player and look back. Don't look forward thinking he's going to build off that. and that's what scares you about Trubisky. It's Terrence Flagler. So that draft, I learned something from there.

And I've never, ever since that draft date, I would never call a kid before. It scared me to death because every time you call the kid, it's like you're going to tip them off. So you get, you're calling your boy. You're calling Texas Tech running back. You're trying to figure out. You're trying to figure out if Vick's going to be your guy.

He gets drafted by the New York Jets. Yeah. What is the process of, okay, we just lost our top guy on the draft board here? Where do we go from now? Is there a plan, is there a secession plan in place already? or is it more scrambling around to figure out who's going to be our guy now? Unlike the Cleveland's got Sashi Brown running their draft,

we had Bill Walsh running our draft, so that was a pretty good plan. Like in 86, the year before, he sends me to the blackboard, no easel boards at this time. He sends me to the blackboard and says, write down these three names. So I write down Gerald Robinson defensive and Auburn. John L. Williams, running back Florida.

Ronnie Harmon, running back Iowa. Okay? So I write him on a blackboard. He says, when we pick, we'll take one of those three guys. Well, the next pick comes up, there goes Gerald Robinson, the Vikings take them. The next pick comes up, there goes John L. Williams, Seattle takes them. The next pick goes up, there goes Ronnie Harmon,

Buffalo takes them. And we look at each other like, holy crap, we've got nobody to pick. We're going to pick Larry Roberts, God rest of his soul, from Dothan, Alabama, who was at the, he played at the University of Alabama. So, Walsh just says, we need to buy some time. So we trade, so we bought a half hour. We traded two picks down to buy a half hour.

Okay, so we could collect our thoughts and figure out what we're going to do. So then once we started trading down, we collected that half hour, Then we traded down again. Then we traded down again. Then we had the first pick in the second round. And then Bobby Bethard wanted to pick Tori Hunter, this corner from San Diego State. So we traded down.

And then we traded our second round pick outright for a first round pick the next year, which Walter Murray, a wide receiver from Hawaii. And the next thing you know, we end up with two-twos, three-threes, three-fours, five, six, seven, all the way through. And then we picked. So then we started to pick. We picked Roberts in the second. We picked Rathman at the top of the third. We picked John, we picked Tim McKeir in the middle of the third.

We picked John Taylor at the bottom of the third. Then we picked Steve Wallace, Kevin Fagan, Charles Haley, in the fourth. Wow, Charles Haley in the fourth. In the fourth. Okay. So, but what makes the story fascinating is that then Haley was the reason why I ended up working for the Raiders because I found Haley and Walsh told Davis that I was on Haley and that's how Al and I became friends. And then Haley ended up being, should have been the first pick over on the draft.

He was a great player. He was the best player in the draft, definitely. Yeah. Speaking of the Raiders, you go to the Raiders in 1998. You're there with Al Davis. You're learning from the Tsar himself, the man that loves football, the man that would take any chance. When you went to Al's draft room, people don't realize, Al was responsible for a lot of the things that I wrote about this in the column on the ringer about the grading system we used in Cleveland. Al was a lot of instrumentally involved with that because we stole some of his ideas.

is. But when you entered Al's draft room, you know, you're too young to remember this TV show called the Twilight Zone. So when you entered Al's... I know the references. Okay, the Twilight Zone. So it's almost like you could hear Rod Sterling saying you're about to enter a place beyond sight and sound. So when you walked in the room, so say it's 1999, you walked into Al Davis's draft room, you really crossed into 1960. There was blackboards, okay? No boards. We had no names on a board. Mickey Marvin, God rest of soul, would write every player's name on the board. There was nobody was going to see where a guy was going to get drafted. And Al would refuse to tell anybody who he was going to pick. So there was a level of secrecy. Computers weren't even allowed in the room.

Okay? We weren't even allowed to have a computer. We had Al-O Cassell sitting over in the corner telling us who just got picked. And he couldn't understand what he was saying. Yeah. Because, you know, so eventually my second year, I brought a computer in there. I just said, hell would it. We got to figure out who they're picking or else we're going to be wrong. So that Al was, but Al controlled every draft. No player got picked. in Oakland without Al saying yes to it. One of the guys that did get picked in 2000. I mentioned him earlier.

Number 17, the first kicker ever taken in the first round, still in the NFL today. Sebastian Janikowski, when you look at that draft, can you just please tell me how Al Davis convinced an entire room of people that with the 17th pick, you guys needed this big kicker who could make 65-yard field goals? Well, so the year before, we lost a lot of games because we had signed a kicker from the Tampa Bay Bucks,

Michael Hustead, okay? And Hustead missed a bunch of kicks. And we basically put them down on like IR at the end of the year, and we signed Joe Nedney late in the year. He kicked a 53-yarder in Kansas City in the last game of the year that won the game. So Nedney really kicked well for us, but we didn't have a kicker.

And Al was obsessed with Jedannikowski's powerful leg. He could make field goals from everywhere. Now, we think in the draft that we're going to pick, I think this was the Todd Heap draft. We're going to pick Todd Heap because we need a tight end. Rudin wants to pick Todd Heap.

But Al wants to kind of make his mark in history, and he wants to pick the, you know, he picked the greatest punter in the history of punters in Ray Guy. So now he's going to pick the greatest kicker in the history of Sebastian Janakowski. And the way Al would do it was, it was a mind game with Al. So you had to say, if you like Sebastian Canakowski, just say Tate liked Sebastian Janikowski,

then Al would say to you, I would put it on you that it was your guy. I'm going to go with you because you like them, right? But if you said you didn't like them, okay, then Al would try to corner you into liking them and then try to fix it on you so then eventually you would, so some way it would come out, it was going to be on you so then Al could absolve. I was just doing what everybody told me to do. Yeah. So either way.

It was your idea. It was like inception. It was Al Davis's inception. Either way. So you really almost like most of the coaches couldn't get it. You almost needed a lawyer in the room to help you because he was going to cross-examine you to the point where you couldn't. And he had Bob Casullo, the special teams coach, who was just putty out of his hands. Well, Bob, is he the best kicker you've ever seen? Oh, he's the greatest

kicker. He was too easy. It was way too easy. It was like hitting layups. So then the next thing you know, we just end up picking, we pick the kicker. So what does Gruden do this whole time when he had Todd Heath? The room set up, the room set up that everybody's in the room. I sat across, Al sat at the main table. He ran the player machine. I sat across from him. John Kingon sat in front of me. Freddie Blitnikov. worked the machine, and Gruden sat off to Al's right. But it was one for all and all for one. Everybody spoke, and you were asked a question, you just couldn't volunteer it.

And then he would like, you know, and you got to take a position because like when Trayvian Smith ran fast at the combat, I told the linebacker, coach, hey, either if you don't like him, he's going to make you like him. And if you like him, then he's going to put it on you. So you got to make the call how you want to work it out. And you just had to play the mind game with that. And I was hard to do. But nobody, trust me, nobody was going to convince him otherwise because he could get the room

worked out. And a couple times we were able to turn the corner on him, and then that was just, you paid hell for that. Was there any time that you guys convinced him to draft someone that he necessarily wasn't bought in on, that eventually he came full circle on that didn't work out? This linebacker we liked from San Diego State,

and Kirk Morrison, he played a few years in the league. It was in the third round. He wanted to pick Jordan Beck from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. And Jordan Beck was like, not a typical Al Davis pick. He had short arms, but he was fast. Okay. Well, the fasting helps. That's all I really cares about. So Al makes a commitment to us.

Like, okay, if Morrison's, if Morrison's, we're in the second round, we didn't have, he said, oh, if he's not there in the second, if he's not there. If he's there in the third, I'll pick him. He throws that kind of out there, like to placate everybody else, you know? Yeah. So now comes the third round, and Beck and Morrison are there. Okay, so there's a huge fight in the room. Al wants to pick Beck. He's the only one who wants to pick Beck.

Nobody else wants to pick him. Everybody wants to pick Morrison. So it's a huge fight. I mean, Rob Ryan's a defense coordinator. getting his ass ripped. Everybody's getting yelled at. Okay, I think Norv Turner was the head coach at this point. Everybody's getting yelled at. Finally, we picked Morrison. Okay. And then Pat Jones, the tight end coach, like seven picks later, Beck goes to Atlanta. Yeah. And I can still hear Pat Jones say, Beck just went. Beck just went. And then that just started off the whole forest fire

again. Yeah. Like then he just started MF and everybody in the room and the room just left the room because he just got pissed off at everybody. But he would control it and he knew what he was going to pick. He knew exactly who he was going to pick. I mean, we saw. sat in the morning. We're watching Texas Tech offensive tape with Wes Welker making every catch on the tape and we drafted Carlos Francis in the fourth round. Because he was the fastest guy at the combine.

Yeah, exactly. That's what I was going to say. He must have been fast. We're watching West Welk making all the plays on the tape. Oh, forget him. We'll draft Carlos Francis because he can run and fast. But that's the way it was. And Al had so much experience to do it. You couldn't fight. You couldn't win that one. You couldn't win. You just had to keep going. Another tidbit from that

2000 draft with Janikowski. The fifth round you guys took Shane Lecler. Yeah. One of the best punters, you know, 21st century. And we got lucky with that because in the fourth round we picked a defensive tackle junior. I don't know I'm not pronounced his name. He was coming off a bad knee from Utah. So we took him thinking that we could get Lechler in the fifth.

Yeah. And it was one of the few times because usually Al was never patient enough to wait around. He would trade next year's three to move up five spots because he just, he had to have it. Just like he had to have, you know, his cheeseburger from McDonald's with 11 French fries for lunch every day. I mean, he had to have it. he was going to do it. And then we traded up and we got it. But Leckler was incredible.

I mean, Leckler can kick too. Lekker, that's rookie year when Janikowski had something wrong with his foot, the day of the game, Leckler went and kicked all the extra points. That's what I mean. It may be one of the best special team drafts of all time. Yeah. But I think we were horrible in between. Who else did we pick in there?

Oh, in 2000? Yeah. I mean, it was pretty much. It was a watch. It was all nobody's other than. Yeah. Well, they were all fast, I promise you. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. They're all very fast. Another guy just going down. I was just going through the year. So we're at the Raiders now. That's great. We've got 2003. We're coming off, John Gruden. They win the Super Bowl, right?

This is 2003. Namdi Asimois is on the table. Number 31, defensive back. You're in this draft room right at this point. When you have a guy like Nambea awesome, why, some supreme talent, a defensive back, do you see the future upside of that? And another to add to tap in on the end of this.

Namdi Asimwa, did he curse the Raiders? Because he gets drafted. And then it all goes bad for quite a little while. You know, it went bad because we mis-evaluated the team. I think we really didn't. We were an older team. We were declining in terms of our talent level. Our drafts had not been good.

Yep. And so when we got Nomdi, Nomdi didn't play the first couple of years. Nomney was a big fast corner, but Al didn't think he was fast enough. So we really had to sell out on the time. And I think you guys took Tyler Brayton, the next pick. We took Tyler Brayton. Yeah, he loved Tyler Brayton. Thought Tyler Brayton could be, he wanted to make Tyler Brayton.

an outside linebacker, which we did. He looked like Herman Munster running around out there at outside linebacker. He wanted to make him, because he thought Tyler Brayton was Ted Hendricks. Oh, okay. Okay. So every player at the Raiders had a Hall of Fame name attached to him. Then the hard thing at the Raiders was Al was

like all about speed. So every time the guy would run at the combine, they would add more time to his 40 times. So most teams that guys run at the combine, say Jamal Adams runs 4-47 at the combine. Or Darius Hayward Bay runs a 4-3. Okay, so then his time would, if he ran 4-3-2 at the combine, they would have made it 4-36.

Yeah. I always wanted to add time. So the guys, and he would never take a corner that was under 4-5. He wanted corners in the low 4-4s. So that's what made Asimwa. It was a hard guy to sell because there was a lot of guys. Peanut Tillman's in that same draft. He went a little bit later.

It was a hard thing to sell him on Asimawa, but because Osama had size and he had speed, we were able to do that. And then we picked Teo Johnson, I think, in the second round, which was a guy that could really run. but we passed Jason Witten to pick Teo Johnson because Jason Witten didn't have a fast enough 40 time. So that's where we got kind of convoluted at Oakland. And that's where Al kind of lost a little bit, we lost a little bit of what we were trying to get done there because everything was about the 40 time.

And what people don't realize is some of these drafts are not always one person has the final say. Like I was attached to all those, and you're involved with them, so you take responsibility for them. But if you don't really have, it's not your decision. to make. Yeah. Somebody had Al's making all those decisions, you know.

And so like I wasn't in the Jamarcus Russell draft. I was at the rate. 2007 was in 2007. I mean, Lane Kiffin, for all his things, he didn't want Jamarcus Russell. He wanted to pick, he wanted to pick the receiver from Georgia Tech. Calvin Johnson. Calvin Johnson. Okay.

And Al was committed to picking Jamarcus Russell. So imagine that career of Megatron out in Oakland in California with sunny weather, not killing his body. There's no telling what would have happened. There's no telling what he could have done. But, you know, like, people say, well, you picture Marcus. No, no. There's one man who pictured Marcus Russell.

And he thought he could change him. And I think where Al got messed up a little bit was that in the 60s and the 70s, the culture of players was so much you could change the player. You know, it wasn't as severe as the culture. You could bring them into your culture and groomed them in a certain way. Exactly. It doesn't necessarily happen in today's world. Whereas later, it couldn't become.

that. And that's why the drafts, and that's why the team started to go declining, because we became so predicated on the stopwatch, we became so dependent upon how fast the guy ran that that's all we cared about when that was an element of it, but it wasn't like guys play better in pads. Like Terrell Suggs, Terl Suggs ran a shitty 40 time, okay? And yet he ended up being a great player. I was in San Francisco in 86, and Bill Walsh sent me to Memphis, Tennessee, three times to time Tim Harris because he kept running five flat. He was an outside linebacker, kept Running five flat. Run, go back again and see if we'll get them in a faster time.

Go back again. I went to Memphis three times. I ate enough barbecue. I gained 50 pounds. I ate barbecue so damn much. I'm running like, Tim Harris would look and be like, you're back here again, man? And you're back again? Yeah, you know, I needed to get back on Beale Street.

You know, I was like, five flat, five flat, you know? Because people are obsessed with them. Finally, you realize, you know, some of these guys, like Suggs or Derek Barnett in this draft, they run, they're fast as they play. The fast and pads are not fast without pads. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So you learn that. And so some guys are fast and pads are fast on the 40 time, but they don't play fast. that's an interesting

interesting insight when you just look at the Raiders in general so you leave the Raiders in 2007 you take a little break right you go and do some media stuff and when you're doing the media stuff you're doing TV when you're watching these drafts and you're seeing how the draft boards are you seeing the little thing

so like you were just talking about how you needed 30 more minutes so you traded back to get yourself time so when we as me as a viewer when I see someone dropping back in the draft or like a Bill Belichick or someone I think that they have some masterful plan where they don't necessarily need these draft, these early guys, and they want to trade back and just get more assets. But sometimes it's something as simple in human nature as we just don't know who we're

going to take and we need more time. Yeah, we're just to me for comfortable. I think, you know, and that 86th draft was the draft that people started trading back now. And I think this is where Belichick has it really good. He gets this better than most. Is Belichick is not about, he's about trying to get, he realizes there's no great player. Like you take the 13 draft when I was in Cleveland. Like, we should have traded down in that draft. It was our mistake not to. And I say, all, I was included. Joe Banner was the president of the team. We should have traded down. We picked Mingo, okay? We liked Mingo. We all liked Mingo. We should have traded down. We all liked Jesmond Trufant. We needed a corner badly. And what happened was we didn't, we thought the player,

we mis-evaluated the blue chippedness of the player. And so if we trade it down, which we had the opportunity to do. We would have picked up a Benny Logan. We would have picked up maybe drafted Jamie Collins. We would have picked up some other players and we make that mistake. And I think Bill does a good job of. Bill does a great job of trading down and not getting married to

one player, just figuring out he's going to get one of several and they're all going to be relatively about the same. Yep. The only time he's ever traded up is when he traded up to get Chandler Jones and trade up to get Hightower. And then he picked Richard Seymour because he was picking there. So for the most part, he sees them all as like in a stack level

not one better than the other. And that's where I think sometimes we all make mistakes. Because that draft, when you go back to 13, look at the top picks, it was a horrendous draft. There was really no great player in the draft in the top part of the draft. That was the Eric Fisher draft that goes number one overall. Eric Fisher can barely play football these days. So it was like there's the mis-evaluation. People say, well, you pick Mingo.

Yeah, we thought Mingo could rush off the corner. And I wrote about this. We thought Mingo could play with more power. Did we blow it? Yeah, because he didn't play with any power. What we should have done is moved down and gotten better players. And we liked a couple of those players. We were getting ready to pick in the third round.

I really liked Logan Ryan. We picked McFadden. We couldn't pick Mouthout because of the testing. This is where you're getting problems where you don't pick a guy because you think he can't test positive. And then the Cardinals take him and he's like, why didn't you take the guy? Well, there's a lot of indications that he wasn't going to be like this. So you're kidding in those situations.

Logan Ryan was a guy I liked a lot. We couldn't build consensus within the organization to draft him. And so you end up, and then right before we're getting ready to make that pick, we're going to pick Benny Logan and the Eagles picked them right before us. And then we basically picked the next guy and it ends up being a mistake. And that's where you probably should have just said, you know what, we need more than, we need a little bit more time. Yeah.

And then we could have done it. And it's really, you know, you're involved. It's nobody's fault. It's everybody's in the room. It's just that you don't have enough, you got to have enough leeway to play it off. And I think sometimes you make those mistakes and then they stay with you. And it's a competitive environment. So I think a lot of people when they, when they view.

football and the few of the draft. It's almost like a separate entity in and of itself, which it is. But there still is a competitive aspect. So I just want to ask about like the smoke screen of competition in general. Like teams basically putting on a front that they would like for example, what we mentioned this earlier, the Jets saying that they're interested in Mr. Riboskey. Is that a smoke screen to get the Browns to take them number one? Yeah. I think like how much, how many little mind games and little things happen like that? Everybody's trying to play. Like what I have here in front of me is a is this is called a mock draft summary. Okay. And so everybody does these mock drafts, which are great. I mean, you get guys from their basement in Des Moines doing mock drafts. I mean, it's great. And everybody's an expert, too. Everybody will tell you what an idiot you are. That's the great thing. When you worked for Al Davis and you've been called an idiot by him, whoever else calls you an idiot is like 10 times lower than that. You can handle it, right? So, you know, so what you do with these, though, Tate, is what you do is you collect these and you take the top guys who do mocks, okay? And then you take all their mocks and you throw all the names in. And then you come out,

with a sense of where the player is going to go. So, like, let's take Dion Dawkins, for example, the offensive guard from Temple. He's right in front of me. So he's ranked, of all the mocks, he ranks 45th, okay? So that means if you're in a value, if you're sitting there and you have the 30th pick in the draft, you could pretty well say, you know what,

he's going to be there for us, okay? Or if you're sitting there and your first pick is not until 70, the chance of you getting Dionne Dawkins is probably not very good. So maybe you need to trade up if that's the guy you really want. Okay. So that's what you use mocks for. They give you a range of where the player's going to go. They're not necessarily right, but they give you a range.

And then you can set your board and you can set your movements predicated on that. And then you can do that. So mock drafts in general, just the way the internet works now, they have, they're involved in the process, right? It's not just you have a, you're not scouting a board strictly with your scouts and your team. separately of itself. You were taking outside information from these other sites and you're basically combining it, putting it all together, aggregating it all, and then trying to come to some sort of consensus across the board.

Like two years ago, we were Mitch Morris, the offensive center for the chiefs. His name was never mentioned in these mocks. So we were picking in the bottom of the second round in New England. We thought really good that we were able to get him. We thought really comfortable that we could get him because there was no indication on this survey here that he was involved with any of them, okay? And yet the chiefs picked him in the middle of the second. Now, what does that tell you? It tells you that guys, when guys call you up to give you a mock, you just keep giving the names of the players that were already in the mock.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, peppers will go there. Peppers will go here. It's a recycling of information. Right. Just so you don't have to give out any new names that you want to give out. Like Ryan Anderson from Alabama, he's not in any mock in the first couple rounds, but everybody tells me he's going to go somewhere between the second and the third round. Well, nobody's giving his name out. Yeah. You see, so there's guys that'll fall through the cracks. So when you put together your top 100 of the mock, that gives you an idea about, okay, these are the top 100 players based on what everybody thinks around the country. We have our board.

Here's what they think. And then we can manage it from figuring out where we're going to have to get the guy. And that's what you try to do. It's really just trying to manage and trying to figure out where you can pick a player and where you can't. Speaking of picking players in specific places, you were with the Patriots, obviously, 2014, through 2016. You drafted two guys, two quarterbacks. You drafted.

You didn't personally draft them, but you were there in the process when it happened. We're learning a lot today that it's not one single person that is making these decisions. Unless it's Al Davis. Or Belichick. But, you know, Bill takes information. There's very few. Now, in Bill's draft room, there's not many people in the room. So there was me, Ernie Adams, Nick Cessario, John, John, Bob Quinn.

There was about five or six people. But that's it. Very small draft room. The Raiders, it was like a press car. I mean, huge. Everybody was in the room. One guy made the call. In Cleveland, it was smaller.

You know, the president of the team, Joe, he had the final say on the draft pick. So he made the call. But the reality here is that in New England, he does make – he decides who to pick, who not to pick. But he takes information in. When you're looking at information on a quarterback in general, the position everyone wants to talk about, like, you've got to have a quarterback if you want to win in football in general.

So when you draft two guys, Garapolo is a guy that now, I mean, a lot of people value and think that could be a starter. could be, you know, the future of the franchise for the Patriots. And then you have a guy like Brissette who showed flashes this year as a rookie. You draft those two guys. How does the process of drafting a modern quarterback and looking at

the value and taking the value proposition in general, like is it worth taking, you took Garoppolo 60 second, you took Brissette 91, is it worth taking those guys to develop? Obviously, you have Tom Brady so you can develop these guys. But what is that process like to determine where a quarterback should go

and how much it can help your team in the future? Well, we really thought Garoppolo was going to go at the top of the second to the Houston Texans. But so when I was in Cleveland, we had traded Trent Richardson for a one. So we ended up with two ones the next year. Yeah. Okay. So after the 13 draft, never did we think we're going to get fired. Never did we think Haslam was just going to blow around the building.

So but because that we were prepared to pick a quarterback in the 14 draft, you know, that was Bridgewater. That was Johnny Mansell. That was Carr. That was a bunch of quarterbacks in that draft. So there was a lot of guys to scout. So when you looked at it, we did a lot of work on those quarterbacks. I did a lot of work on those quarterbacks, starting with the spring scouting all the way through. And Garoppolo was a kid that always was interesting to me because he had a great release.

He reminded me a little bit of, like a little of Tony Romo, even though he played at Eastern Illinois. And his character was really good. We had a really good character. His family life was good. Carr was being dinged by the association that maybe he was like his brother. He wasn't very tough. It's tough to have that last name. And so, and that's people say, well, how is Carr a second round pick?

Well, it was almost like he paid a price for that. But his coach, Pat Hill, worked for us in Cleveland. At Fresno State, right. At Fresno State, he worked for us. I worked with Pat Hill at UNLV. So when Pat Hill came to Cleveland, I helped Pat Hill come to Cleveland to work for Bill Belichick. So I knew Carr, okay, Manzel had his own set of problems. Manzell was a unique player, but there was problems with Manzell.

There was no doubt. And building to the problems. it was getting worse and worse as a drafts. And there were stories coming out of there that weren't good. And Bridgewater was a kid that had a lot of things going for him. Had an amazing Sugar Bowl game. But wasn't necessarily a great leader, didn't have a command, but he was a really good player. So there was a lot.

So then we get fired. I go to New England. Brady's coming off the 13th season. Didn't play particularly well. Didn't have a lot of weapons. The best time of draft a quarterback in the NFL, what Ted Thompson showed everybody, is when you have a quarterback. Yep.

So he picks Aaron Rogers, even though Brett Farr is playing good. And that's how the Garoppolo pick came out. Now, the thing that New England does a great job of, when they bring these kids in, they don't just take them on recruiting dinners and take them out. They really put the kid through the process and make them have to. We brought Mansell and Garoppolo in the same day in New England, okay, brought them in the same day, put them through the same battery of test, interviewed them the same way. And both of them were really smart football players.

Both of them came out saying, you know what, these guys would fit well into the program because whomever you bring into the New England program has to withstand the Brady element. Yeah. Like you can't bring a guy who's going to look at Brady and say, oh my God, you're great. You got to look at a guy who's going to come in and want to compete against Brady. Yeah, and be better than him. And that's where Gropolo really won. He won the murder.

That's how you have to approach it. And then what New England does a great job is defining what they want in the player and then searching that out. Teams like Cleveland are just looking for players. That's when you make the most mistakes. Well, Cleveland's going to have two chances to write their mistakes in the first round this year in the draft. Just we're going to wrap this up. We're going to look at big picture. Is there anything on the draft in the draft Thursday that you're thinking of right now?

Like one question that I have, do you think the New England Patriots first pick will actually be the 72nd pick? Yeah, I definitely do. I don't think he's going to move. He's got six picks. Look, when you look at their team, so here's the other things people don't do. I tweeted this yesterday. For example, the Baltimore Ravens have 30%. This is the actual number.

They have 30% playtime that they have to replace from last year's team. Now, what does that mean? That means when you take all the players that played, okay, the one of the ones, that left take playtime with them, right? Yep. Okay, so you cut Dumerville, he has X amount of playtime. You cut this player or you lose this player here. So you have to replace that playtime.

Now, what teams do in Free Agency is they replace that playtime with other guys who have played. New England lost 20% of their playtime with the seven guys they lost. They replaced it with these guys. Okay. So you do that. Baltimore hasn't done that. They still have 30% play. So it's got to come from guys that are currently on their team or in the draft.

Okay. So I think what you'll see in the draft is you'll see a lot. lot of teams, especially in this draft, there'll be a lot more jockey in for position. Because the level of players, if you don't get the guy, for example, if you don't get that offensive lineman, if New York doesn't get an offensive alignment, where do they get one in the second or third round? It won't happen.

It becomes more difficult. So that's what I'm looking forward to in this draft is to see how these teams are going to fill those voids of the playtime by what happens. Yeah, it's going to be an interesting draft. My one big thing that I think that may happen in this draft, I think the Malcolm Butler deal could happen with the Saints. I don't think it will. And here's why.

Because I think Bill doesn't really want a first round pick. I don't think he thinks there's probably a player. I'm not speaking for him, but I would suspect he doesn't think there's going to be a player. Say, if the Saints give up 11, is there somebody? You have to turn the player into a name, right? And you have Malcolm Butler, a $3.9 million. That's a relatively cheap deal. And he's on your team.

He's a good player. He makes your team better. Unless somebody really offers you a good deal, why would you do it? Same thing with Grapolo. Adam Schaefter tweeted out they're not going to trade Garapolo. I've been saying that for how long now? Yeah, for quite some time. I mean, they're not going to, because Gropolo is too good of a player.

They're not going to do it. People say, well, you're just shill him for Belichick. You're just his mouthpiece. No, I'm just telling you he's a good player. They're not going to trade a good player for what? The 30th pick in the draft? Who are you going to be better? Taco Charlton.

Yeah, is he better than, would you trade Taco Charlton for Jimmy Gropolo? Probably not. You won't do that, right? Would you trade Dionne Dawkins for Jimmy? No. Yeah. But see, fans don't think of it that way. They think, oh, it's a first round pick.

you've got to put the name with the player. That checks out. Is there anything big picture from GM Street that we should get out there before the draft hits us on Thursday? You'll be doing live videos here with Kevin Clark on Thursday night after the draft reaction stuff.

More podcasts on Friday. This will be the only GM Street of the week. So if there's anything that's on your chest right now, Lombardi, you have to get it off your chest for the people. Well, I'm really anxious to see this quarterback, see where the quarterbacks go, whether it's Mitchell Tribesky goes one. And then Patrick Mahomes, I know people like Patrick Mahomes.

Pat Mahomes is a guy that could go at 11 at the Saints. There's a lot of love for Pat Mahomes. And then, you know, where does my man, Dachian Watson go? I think that's the other thing. I think we got to – but to me, I'm interested to see. People say it's not a great quarterback draft, but there's probably going to be four of them drafted.

And we should – last thing I'll say, Dishon Watson said this. He said, pick Mitchell Trabisky over me and live with the consequences. I love it. I love it. Deshaun't you say? Wouldn't you say that? I would say it. I think it sounds good.

I think he may be right. You think North Carolina – you think if Clemson called North Carolina and said, we'll trade you Deshaun Watson from Mitchell-Tribiskey, how would that trade work out? Sounds like I'd have two national championships to brag about right now. That's right. That's right. To go along with your basketball one, that's right.

Yep. Well, Lombardi, thanks. You'll be back Thursday. Yep. And we'll keep it rolling. GM Street. We'll be back next week. We'll have actual players to talk about on new teams.

We'll talk about it. Yeah, big picture storylines going into the actual season. So more GM Street to come. Thanks for listening.