The Emotionally Ambivalent 2021 NFL Draft Preview
photo: Martin Reisch | unsplash
I’ve been trying to quit the NFL since January.
Now isn’t the time to dive deeply into why I’m trying to quit — I’m planning a longer, full-scale column to address that later. For now, suffice it to say that there are two central issues at play: the people in charge (including owners and corporate leadership), and their collective, inexplicable refusal to adequately address the shoddy process of gameday officiating.
So in January, I quit — tentatively. I skipped the Super Bowl and paid no attention to free agency. Like many bad habits, this one seemed safely in the rearview mirror… until it wasn’t.
It was the NFL Draft that lured me back, slowly but surely, until I woke up this week to the realization of a full-scale relapse. A month ago I couldn’t have told you much about even the top prospects. Now, just hours before the draft gets underway, I find that I have clear opinions on which interior linemen I prefer in the later rounds. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.
In any case, here are three storylines to expect from the 2021 NFL Draft.
1) Teams will be more wary of players who opted out of the college season than mock drafters have been. Despite the advances of the Mock Draft Industrial Complex, prognostication is no exact science, and every year there are a handful of players who get drafted later than expected, or who fall out of the first round altogether. This year I expect most of that group to be comprised of guys who opted not to play the 2020 college season.
Take, for example, Penei Sewell. The mammoth offensive tackle is viewed by many as a generational talent. But he’s played just 14 college football games, mostly against subpar defensive opponents in the Pac-12 conference, and has been out of action since his sophomore season two years ago, when he was barely 19 years old. The year before that he was injured and missed six games.
The first OT off the board last year was Andrew Thomas, fourth overall to the New York Giants, to the tune of $32 million guaranteed. Setting aside Thomas’s underwhelming rookie performance, at least he had a timely and relevant body of work to evaluate: three accomplished seasons in the powerhouse Southeastern Conference. If you’re a scout or a journalist who believes in Sewell’s talent, the cost of projecting him as a top-five pick is nil. But if you’re the executive on the hook for a $32 million investment, it’s fair to imagine you might require a little more data, a little more risk mitigation, before pulling that trigger.
Maybe Sewell turns out to be the wrong example, as I believe he’ll fare better than most opt-outs. But as a whole, expect to see big names from the popular mock drafts — guys like Caleb Farley, Rondale Moore, Rashawn Slater, Walker Little, and even, to a lesser extent, Ja’Mar Chase — drift downward as teams choose to allocate their most valuable draft capital to players viewed as lower-risk.
All of this is a shame, of course, since opting out was overwhelmingly the safest and most socially responsible choice any player could have made at the time. Given the way the Covid-19 crisis has unfolded, probably no one should have played football last fall.
2) Cornerback Asante Samuel will be selected in the Top 25. For most, Samuel is no more than the fourth- or fifth-ranked CB in the class, and many first-round mocks exclude him entirely. But I think there’s a good chance he’s best-in-class, and I suspect several teams are laying low, talking up flashier players like South Carolina’s Jaycee Horn, and quietly hoping Samuel falls right in their lap.
Never mind that he’s not the biggest or fastest guy at his position. His game is predicated on silky-smooth movement skills and a knack for route anticipation that borders on the clairvoyant. That’s a skillset that translates to the NFL regardless of scheme or era. He won’t make it to the bottom of round one.
3) Teams will value future picks more than in years past. Not only does the 2021 player pool come with fewer numbers to crunch and less film to study, it’s also a much smaller pool overall — per Kalyn Kahler of The DeFector, only 657 prospects have signed with an agent, which is down from more than 1,800 a year ago.
It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where teams’ draft boards are more dissimilar than usual, leaving some organizations to feast on late-round players they love while others look to convert some of this year’s draft capital into selections next year and beyond, when (presumably) college seasons resume en masse and the prospect evaluation process more closely resembles the pre-pandemic norm.
With that in mind, perhaps a well-situated team with a stockpile of 2021 picks decides to take a big swing, packaging a few in order to move up and make a big splash in rounds one or two. Conversely, teams with more glaring long-term needs might be smart to amass picks down the road, when they won’t have to gamble limited capital on such a depleted, untested talent pool.
One more thing.
As I put the finishing touches on this, reports are flooding in about Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who is said to be so unhappy with the team that he might want out altogether. If that’s the case, he might be doing me a favor: as a lifelong Packers fan, I’ve told friends and family for years that once Rodgers is gone, so am I. Maybe this is the final nudge that pushes me from emotionally ambivalent NFL fan to recovering escapee.
Hope springs eternal… but in the meantime, bring on the madness.