It’s based on two simple things
1. Beane trades up in round 1 more often than not
2. no one who covers football can look at the receiver room in place for a 27 year old elite QB and imagine a front office not going all in to fix it.
I still expect a defensive lineman, a move up in round 2 after letting every team in the league have their choice of receivers and either trading for or signing a vet to add to the pile of #3 WRs
And I expect next year McDermott to be on the hot seat and Beane to go get real WRs
And…I am positive that if it was Ed Oliver he traded instead of Diggs and the draft had three huge ones in the top ten…Beane would move whatever it took to get one. and they still wouldn’t stop Mahomes. But they will get farther away from scoring with him.
There's more to it than that.
Von Miller is an aspiring front office executive. He's been shadowing Beane. There's no way he gives out that information..... unless there's a reason. And the reason isn't to drum up trade partners.
All the "draft gurus" out there miss the point that they have one board. There are 32 boards. Who would've ever imagined Beane walks out of last year's draft with Dalton Kincaid? But we don't know Beane's board, or the board of the other 31 teams.
There's so much behind the scenes works that none of us will ever know. We see game play and combine numbers, and then watch the draft off the ESPN or NFL Network boards, and think we can properly analyze the picks.
We have no access to interviews, what coaches think, any of the team visits, etc.
Imagine Brian Thomas or Ladd McConkey come into visit and have a terrible interviews, seem unprepared, and say dumb things like "I don't want to play in the cold." We'll never know that. We'll just see Beane pass on those players and think he's a moron. But we are making judgments with maybe 50% of the available information a team has.
And then, even after that, there's no guarantee that teams will trade with Beane. He can call the Giants all he wants and try to get pick 6 to get a receiver. But if they are set and making their pick, that's not Beane's fault.
I got to see the inside of this process from a team perspective. What we talk about on this board is really talking about players with 50% of the information we need to make informed decisions. None of us have any clue what the available possibilities are and what teams are thinking.
Here's an example. What if Beane and the team are absolutely sold on Xavier Legette at receiver. They've done probably about 10K AI supported mock drafts at this point. They know what his range is pretty well. Beane has Legette ranked a lot higher than most teams based on the Bills board. So he passes on a trade up and makes a small trade down to get the 3rd round pick back he doesn't have. He then takes Legette.
Some people on this board are going to lose their minds. But what if Beane had him rated as a 1- but knew from AI mocks that he wasn't universally rated that way? So he trades down and still gets a 1- talent. And we'll never know that type of information.
Things that Beane has that no one here has:
- An entire scouting department who watches games and knows a lot more about football than we do
- A coaching staff who also review games
- Interviews with college coaches, college friends, family, etc. to gain an understanding of a player's character
- Interview results from the combine
- Results from 30 player visits
- Around 10K AI supported mock drafts
We should be patient and see what happens. Beane and McDermott took this team from a 17 year drought to perrenial contender. They didn't luck into that. They know what they are doing.
billswire.usatoday.com
theathletic.com
