2023 NFL Draft - The Chicago Bears are on the clock

The Game Room
21

Yeah. This topic is going to be pretty annoying all offseason. The meatballs are going to full on rage any time someone suggests a path forward where Fields isn’t the second coming of Mahomes/Josh Allen/Steve Young with a sprinkling of Vick/Jackson. It’s going to get toxic in a hurry.

While I’m wildly excited about Fields, and I concede he’s had no help at all from the OL or WRs, he’s not there yet. I am hopeful he can get there, but you can’t win in this league just by being the greatest rushing QB ever. You gotta diagnose defenses, you gotta anticipate throws, you have to be precise throwing over the middle and to the sticks, you can’t regularly get stripped in the pocket and you can’t throw balls that get deflected at the line. Every one of these things he can learn, certainly better blocking and route running makes it all easier, but we haven’t seen it yet. You’re a fool if you assume it’s a foregone conclusion.

If Bryce Young or Will Levis look like generational talents at QB and one of those guys shows out to the degree that you will end up regretting passing on them for two decades, you take the fucking guy. The press will eat you alive, but that’s the call you need to make. Poles said the correct thing, he’d need to be absolutely blown away to draft a QB at one…which is precisely the correct approach.

What does this QB class look like? Any particularly great prospects?

I don’t think there’s a guy like Burrow or Lawrence in this class. I’m not even convinced that Stroud is as good a prospect as either Lance or Fields were when they came out. Bryce Young seems to have everything you want in a QB except for size. I don’t know if he’s Tua, or if he’s Russ or if he’s something new we haven’t seen yet. At this stage I think it’s a safe bet that he ends up as the only Tier 1 prospect.

Will Levis is the prototypical guy that scouts are going to absolutely drool over. People comp him to Josh Allen (critics may say Jay Cutler), I think he’s a bit less physically gifted but he played better competition. The issue with Levis is that he just didn’t produce at the elite level you’d expect in college. Like Fields with the Bears, he didn’t have much help at Kentucky, so scouts will need to unpack that. But if there’s a guy who absolutely makes GMs wet themselves at the Combine he’s probably the guy.

Stroud is going to be compared to Fields. He’s a better college passer than Fields but not close as a runner statistically. But the big question with Stroud will be upside. Personally, I think he’s capped out now. He’s not physically as gifted as Levis and he’s not as natural a playmaker as Young, but he does have some great tape out there. He also has a ridiculous WR corps to make him look good. I would not be shocked if a team fell in love with Stroud and wanted him first overall, but I also wouldn’t be shocked to see him have a draft day slide just like Fields did.

I guess the Giants are stuck with Daniel Jones. He’s earned at least one more year, though he becomes an unrestricted free agent right after the season. I don’t know if they can franchise tag him before then, but if they can they probably will. Same deal with Barkley, I think.

This seems to be the consensus. But that would scare the shit out of me if I were a Giants fan. I have never believed in Jones, but much like Mitch Trubisky, he’s had his moments and he’s won football games. Even if they bring Jones back, they would be better off franchise tagging him. I would not want to be married to him for 5-6 years at big money. And really, really wouldn’t want to pass up the chance to draft a guy just because Jones made the playoffs once. They won’t be picking high enough to grab one of the top guys, but these are dangerous waters.

Here’s the most exciting thing I heard today…

22

I think the big question is, what kinda haul do you get trading Fields vs trading the 1st round pick? Because if they draft a new QB and throw him into the same roster, it’s going to be a disaster. Even with the cap to spend, they need to rebuild through the draft.

23

99% sure this is just smoke. Poles has to let other teams think he might take a QB because that maximizes the trade value of the pick. But so far, none of the top QBs project as a can’t miss prospect such as Lawrence or Burrow. As you note, however, that can change over the next few weeks.

24

As a Bears fan, I’m hoping we can swap that #1 pick for:

  • A 2023 top 10 pick
  • Two or more picks later in the 2023 draft
  • A 2024 first-round pick

That aligns with what the Rams traded Tennessee in 2016 to take Goff with the #1 pick.

I’ve also heard the idea of Indy trading DeForest Buckner and their #4 to grab the #1. Not enough, IMO, but intriguing.

25

We’re fortunate that there will almost certainly be multiple bidders. The price will be dictated by the market, not the historic examples. Which is the best possible situation.

26

And that one of those bidders appears to be the Colts, which have expressed interest in the #1 pick, and have an impulsive, active owner.

27

Do you mean shocking as surprising or shocking as in awful?

Seahawks 1st round picks are rare. Top 25 picks especially so.

Charles Cross was the first pick the Seahawks had in the top 25 since 2012. He has had a solid rookie season especially for a tackle, it’s early days but I fully expect he will prove worthy of a top 10 pick. I don’t think the choice was particularly surprising.

Jordyn Brooks was a surprise pick but one I am more than happy with at 27 overall

It was no surprise we traded down in 2019 and L J Collier was regarded as a decent, unsurprising pick at the time, it hasn’t worked out but at 29 overall that happens (it also happens with higher picks look at Zach Wilson.)

Penny and Ifedi are the only two shocking 1st round picks in the last 10 years. When fit Penny is a decent RB but the short career and likelyhood of injury means to draft an RB in the 1st round they need to be someone special which most people at the time didn’t think Penny was. Ifedi was a stretch and not at our greatest position of need. Even having said that they werre taken at 27 and 31 so were little more than 2nd rounders.

28

They immediately came to mind for bad first round picks.

The irony is that Nick Chubb was available when Penny was drafted, and Seattle stayed away from him because they were worried that he might be injury prone. And to be fair, he lost significant time in college from multiple serious injuries.

However, Chubb has been a Pro Bowler every year. Penny has shown promise but has yet to be healthy for an entire year. He barely played this year.

I think that it just shows you that it’s really hard to predict where a player’s career will go.

29

Shocking in that the guys they take are almost always graded as reaches. If a team is going to take a 2nd round prospect in the 1st, it’s recently been the Seahawks or the Raiders. On occasion those guys panned out, on occasion they didn’t. But it’s pretty consistent that the draftniks end up scratching their heads.

30

Seattle is just weird. They reach in early rounds, but found folks like Russell Wilson and Richard Sherman in late rounds. Even among the fanbase there have been jokes for years about Seattle’s late round draft picks being more valuable than early ones.

(And Seattle also trades back a lot, enough that it’s a cliche, so they might even be aware that they are better with later picks.)

Of course, that all changed last year.

31

Did it change?
While Charles Cross was a solid pick I would say case that Abraham Lucas and Tariq Woolen are more valuable and over the cap agree.
Over the cap OTC valuations: Cross 6.4m, Lucas 8.4m Wollen 15.6m
Looks to me as if the quality of all picks went up regardless of round.

32

Absolutely it did. On their first pick they chose Charles Cross, when everyone expected Seattle to either trade that pick away or pick some oddball choice that nobody expected would go that early in some form of 4D chess. Instead, they picked the player that most teams would pick, and who was expected to be drafted at that time.

Here is an analysis (just a random example, literally the first Google result I got, but it’s close to what others said):

The worst pick was rated at C+. Funny enough, the first 6 picks all saw playing time and almost all of them were important to their success this year. Woolen, who they gave a “B” in this analysis, is in the Pro Bowl. But generally there was little-to-no criticism for their whole draft strategy, the first time I can remember seeing that.

I was going to show you 2021’s grades, but they only had 3 picks that year so it’s not a good sample. Funny enough, the one “A” pick they were given that year was for Stone Forsythe who has yet to be a starter.

Clutchpoints didn’t have a rating for Seattle in 2020, so I went to NBC, and they had a sort of meta analysis:

https://www.nbcsports.com/northwest/seattle-seahawks/2020-nfl-draft-grades-seahawks-reaching-and-over-drafting

Massive criticism.

In 2019 they had praise for drafting DK Metcalf, who they lucked into drafting at the spot they did, basically A+ grades from everyone. The other drafts were C+ at best. (Except USA Today liked Marquis Blair and gave him a B+.)

https://www.si.com/nfl/2019/04/25/seattle-seahawks-nfl-draft-picks-selections-grades-list-analysis

That’s pretty typical. Go back for years and you’ll see a lot of people scratching their heads over the Seahawks year after year. Last year was the only time in more than a decade that they were given praise for drafting in a way that made sense to people. It was a dramatic difference.

My gut tells me that this next draft will be similar. They have a lot of good picks again, and I think they’ll pick quality guys each time. (I hope they do, it worked out great last year.)

33

And of course, the “conventional thinking” draft in 2022 turned out to be one of the best ones. People pretend that GMs are preternaturally gifted when it comes to their draft board. I think in reality, the crowd tends to be much better overall than your average GM working in isolation. The crowd can fall into a trap with groupthink and hype, but at certain stages of the process the “Expert” rankings are pretty damn good.

34

During this season I was impressed with Dexter Lawrence, the Giants DT they drafted a couple years ago. I went back to read opinions at the time on the Giants drafting him 17th overall in 2019.

I can’t find it now, but the article I found at the time was critical. “Why did you trade away Snacks Harrison just to burn a first-round pick on his replacement who best case scenario might be as good, but not better. Should have just kept Harrison.” Paraphrased, of course.

That article did not age well. Snacks Harrison barely played in 2019 and retired at the start of 2020. Meanwhile Dexter Lawrence has become arguably a top five DT in the league. And that could very well increase as generational talents like Aaron Donald age out.

35

It’s all about context. Criticizing a team for replacing an aging player with a young player in general is foolish. It’s pretty rare a case where a 9th year DL is going to be a better asset than a rookie with high potential. So whoever wrote that was probably a bit of a dope. Dexter Lawrence was a 1st round graded prospect so that pick shouldn’t have been very controversial at the time. The best criticism might have been that Jeffery Simmons was on the board and a better prospect at the same position.

36

Seattle was criticized for letting Bobby Wagner go and relying on young players in his place. And I think the criticism is fair. Wagner is still awesome, he is almost surely going to be a Hall of Famer, and still plays like one. He’s on the Rams and has done quite a bit of damage to the Seahawks when they play LA. (He was awesome in the last regular season game on Sunday.)

But he was expensive. Seattle had some real solid players that can be their future that couldn’t get to the field, and Wagner’s salary would limit who else they can have on the team. I guarantee you that they didn’t like losing him, and he certainly indicated that he didn’t want to go either. But I don’t see that they had a choice, and I think it was the best long-term decision for them.

The “hang onto a veteran or rely on a promising young player” dilemma is something that all teams face all the time. It’s never easy.

37

Exactly right, and to clarify, they weren’t saying that they reached when they picked Lawrence. Just that they shouldn’t have traded Snacks in the first place and been able to spend that first rounder on a different position of need.

I think the article emphasized that it wasn’t a position of need in the first place until they traded Snacks to Detroit during the 2018 season. But in hindsight it appears that maybe the Giants knew something about his imminent dropping off a cliff, since 2018 was the last season he made an impact.

38

I can not think of Snacks without thinking of this video.

I always thought after seeing that, that he’d be a cool guy to hang out with.

Or he could be on a police procedural show as a specific culinary forensic specialist on a CSI unit.

39

I like with professional athletes, if you give them a game, regardless how stupid, they care how well they do.

40

Yes, very much the case. I was careful in my wording there, the high upside rookie is almost always a better asset than an expensive, aging veteran. Even one playing at a Pro Bowl level. Wagner at his price would have still helped the Seahawks win games, but when constructing a roster that’s not always enough. Costs and roster spots matter.

With rare exceptions, having (or alternatively not having) one high performing player doesn’t dictate a position of need. You can’t really have too many great DLs. Further reinforces my thinking that this person was a dolt.