|
After a lengthy back-and-forth with friends offline about the ATL Penix pick, I think I have come around to a new place on it.
The central question is really just about the QB position in the modern NFL. It's obviously important, pretty clearly the most important single position anywhere in major professional sports, and arguably dictates team success in an overwhelming fashion overall. Buying into this logic further and further toward the extreme side can send you into directions that start to seem irrational. (We've seen this debate in miniature in the last decade or two as merely good-enough starters sometimes get market-setting contracts, and more recently as we rethink what the QB market properly looks like as a % of the overall team salary cap...and maybe that needle hasn't even come to rest quite yet, looking at you Mr. Mahomes)
So, IFF you buy that "QB = nearly everything" then much of the logic that would sensibly apply to any another position just might go out the window. Continue to heckle the Raiders for targeting the standout TE after just acquiring a top TE last year, as an imperfect but current example - that's fine, TE isn't what determines the whole story. But, if QB is indeed basically what drives NFL success, then you basically take you shot any time you believe there's a solid chance of landing a top QB, period. Meaning that yes, even if you have made a financial commitment to a current veteran starter for the 2-3 years ahead, you still go ahead and draft a new guy if your scouting convinces you he may well be the real deal. If he is the real deal, even if it takes 2-3 years to see that and you will have missed out on getting value from him as a young/cheap starter, you could either walk into a high level still-young starter late in his rookie contract (a la Jordan Love) or you could perhaps parlay that promising young guy into a Browns-for-Watson overpayment from a QB-starved franchise elsewhere and reap back more draft capital than you expended initially.
I don't think I buy this overall, but... I think it's at least a coherent way to get yourself to "Falcons drafting Penix there was okay, or even smart." It's because QB is just so off-the-charts different that the normal logic and rules just can't apply to the process of acquiring a possible star there.
|