The Falcons rebuild: Don’t call it tanking

May 9, 2022

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The NFL is a less patient place than it’s ever been. The success of the Rams and Buccaneers, and their respective, aggressive, for-today team-building approaches—even if there’s a lot more that’s gone into their construction than that—has led to widespread perception that, in 2022, you can microwave yourself a Super Bowl champion.

Likewise, the Broncos, Packers and others have pushed money into the future, and thrown the sort of caution you’d uniformly see five or 10 years ago to the wind to try and keep up.

And then, you have the Falcons. They aren’t alone in being more deliberate in today’s breakneck environment. The Texans and Lions, to name two more, are similarly laying a foundation over time, in hopes it’ll be built to last.

But in part by design, and in part due to circumstance, second-year Falcons coach Arthur Smith and GM Terry Fontenot are really going through what might look like a first year from the outside in. They dealt away franchise quarterback Matt Ryan. They’ll carry more than $62 million in dead money this year (about 30% of this year’s cap), accounting for five guys no longer in Atlanta, with $56 million of it tied to departed team icons Ryan and Julio Jones.

There will be high draft picks in some of the vacated spots, undrafted free agents in others, and Smith sure knows what you’re thinking, and the narrative (tanking) that’s already being kicked around. His response? More or less—and these are my words, not his—Don’t fire up that tape of C.J. Stroud and Bryce Young just yet.

“You’re always trying to win,” Smith says, with a little edge in his voice. “I don’t know what coach goes in there and doesn’t try to win. That’s just insane to me. Now, I know everyone’s at different phases. There’s been a lot of teams crowned in the offseason. But this team’s excited to go out there and compete; that’s what we get paid to do. It’s simple as that.”

Now, Atlanta’s situation isn’t that simple.

Still, the way they’re building in today’s environment takes stomach, belief, resolve and, yes, a lot of that dirty word—patience. And yet, neither Smith nor Fontenot think that it’s going to take a whole lot of losing to make it work. Which makes these guys a fascinating case study in a different way to construct a football operation in today’s NFL.

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We’ve made it to the NFL’s quiet time, but that doesn’t mean we won’t keep bringing it in this space—it just means we gotta be a little more creative. So along those lines, in this week’s MMQB, we’ve got …

• A good look at the NFL’s latest diversity initiative.

• The free agents left on the market.

• Motivations for the Steelers to start Kenny Pickett.

• Context on the looming market for the 2023 draft QBs.

And a whole lot more. But we’re starting with the story of reimagining the Falcons, and a rebuild that is old school and new school all at once.

There’s design to what Atlanta’s doing. First, though, it’s important to deal with the aforementioned circumstances.

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When the new guys got to town in January 2020, there were six players on the roster (Ryan, Jones, Grady Jarrett, Jake Matthews, Deion Jones, Dante Fowler) accounting for $136.29 million on their 2021 salary cap—which left just $46.2 million for Smith and Fontenot to spend on the rest of the roster. Which, obviously, is where the work started.

The Falcons cut Fowler, traded Julio Jones, and restructured Ryan, Matthews and Deion Jones, only leaving Jarrett’s deal alone. And while some would say they should’ve just taken their cap medicine then, in Year 1, there was a reason they didn’t, and it’s not far off from what we’ve seen happen in a few other places that delay a teardown for a year.

Really, neither Fontenot nor Smith thought they had, or should, throw a year in an effort to build faster. So just as they aren’t sending a white flag up the pole this year, they didn’t want to do it last year either, because it was important for both the coach and GM to set a competitive tone from the start.

“You need results in some way, shape or form to have that buy-in,” Smith says. “You can’t just be selling hope. And I think last year, certainly, we didn’t get to where we wanted to, we weren’t playing in the postseason. But we were in it until just about the very end, all the way until Buffalo in early January, so the team did start to see results, they saw the mindset shift, they understand what style we want to play in all three phases. There was definitely progress made.”

And, as Smith saw it, that shone through at two junctures in a 7–10 campaign.

The first came after the team’s 0–2 start. In the first two games, at home against the Eagles and then in Tampa, the Falcons battled early (and showed plenty of character coming back on the Bucs) only to collapse late. Against Philly, there was a lull Smith noticed in the second half on the sideline coinciding with the tent folding up. Against Tampa, things came undone with turnovers in the fourth quarter.

“So it was the next weekend in New York, it wasn’t a pretty game, but we’d held the lead, they took it late, we went back and tied it,” Smith says. “And then we were able to play good situational football, milked the clock, kicked the field goal and walked off [with a win over the Giants]. And I thought that was a turning point.”

The second piece of growth happened later, when that sideline lull seen in the opener seemed to extend over a few weeks, following the team getting to 4-4—and it came to life in blowout losses to New England and Dallas that could’ve killed the team’s confidence.

Instead, the team’s response—in a win over Jacksonville, a competitive loss to the Bucs, and a win over the Panthers—didn’t just keep the Falcons in the playoff race past Christmas. It also showed Smith that his coaching staff was getting through to the players as Smith was getting a firmer handle on what he was dealing with, and which guys would be the ones he and Fontenot would begin to build around.

“The leadership started to emerge that we’re excited about, with Jake, [Chris] Lindstrom on the offensive side, and defensively, [A.J.] Terrell coming into his own, and Grady being as consistent as they come,” Smith says. “Really those guys … they’re guys you believe in. They’re all different stages. But especially with the guys up front, with what we’re looking to establish on both sides, that’s there.”

Which brings us to where the Falcons are now.

Eventually, the Band-Aid was going to come off—but Fontenot and Smith weren’t going to do it until they felt like they had a locker room, and program foundation, to absorb it.

“You want to do it in phases, you gotta assess the place,” Smith says. “You don’t truly know a place until you’re there for a whole year, what’s really doable and what’s not. Obviously, as we transitioned last year, it started to feel a lot different than it’d been. Normally, that’s a natural progression, when you bring in a new GM and coach. I always say this, and I’ll go on record, they had really good coaches. I have a ton of respect for Dan [Quinn] and that staff.

“But as things cycle out, there’s a new regime in and we had to go through our own transition, and that’s not gonna all happen overnight. You need to assess everything and that team last year competed the best it could. I think we have a much clearer picture now.”

With the dust now settled, you can set up where the Falcons are and were earlier in the offseason with four tentpoles.

Smith (left) and Mariota will reunite this season.

George Walker IV/Tennessean.com/USA Today Sports

At quarterback, Atlanta was going to consider all its options. But first was decision time on Ryan, landing right around when the Falcons made a play for Deshaun Watson. And though the timing on the two situations coincided, both Smith and Fontenot had been talking for a couple months about what to do with Ryan as they sought closure, one way or another, on whether or not to move forward with each member of the previous regime’s core.

“It wasn’t tough, because it had nothing to do with the respect I have for him,” Smith says. “We’d moved on. He had a great career, and I’ll always be appreciative of it, very thankful I got to work with him. But we moved on, and that’s the nature of the game. Professionally, you have to separate that from your personal relationships and do what’s best for the team and organization. And that’s what we did.”

Adding that result to the decision Watson made to not return to his home state meant the Falcons needed to make a decision on whether or not to go all-in on another quarterback, or maintain flexibility at the position past 2022. Ultimately, with a shaky QB class in the draft and a dried-up veteran market, the Falcons chose the latter. They signed Marcus Mariota, whom Smith coached for five years in Tennessee, and drafted Cincinnati’s Desmond Ridder in the third round a week ago, investing a one-year deal and third-round pick in the process, which keeps Atlanta limber in the quarterback market going into 2023.

That, to be sure, doesn’t mean Mariota or Ridder can’t be the long-term answer. But both come with benefits as culture fits, meaning the floor is pretty high for each guy. Mariota brings a ton of starting experience, and Ridder, at worst, projects as a strong backup because of his high football IQ and leadership traits.

And if Ridder fixes his accuracy issue and ascends to start? Great. And if Mariota reprises the Ryan Tannehill story that Smith helped write—one in which Mariota was displaced as Tannehill resuscitated his career—and finally realized his first-round potential? Smith wouldn’t be shocked.

“If we ever had to go back to Marcus that year, and [Mike] Vrabel said it to me at one point, I think he would’ve played well,” Smith says. “There were some tough lessons learned, he’d had some really good moments at certain points of his career, we certainly hadn’t been stable around him, if you go back. And I’d been with him the whole time, a lot of coaches in and out, there were a lot of assistants changing, ’16, ’17, ’18, when he was the full-time starter.

“And he led us to a playoff win in ’17 in Kansas City. I think the effect of everything, where he was at, he’s in a completely different place now. Just the way he sees that position, the way he sees that job, I think we’re going to get the best version of him. Even getting to sit behind Derek Carr, he sees things a lot different than he did at that point of his life in 2019.”

And if that doesn’t add up to better results, Atlanta can take another swing at QB next year.

Other veterans, Smith and Fontenot thought, were important to keep based on their laying the 2021 foundation. Namely, Matthews and Jarrett were guys that the new brass saw as symbols, in a lot of ways, of what the Falcons were looking to build—tough line-of-scrimmage players whom other players would follow into the fire.

Matthews signed a three-year, $55 million extension in March. Jarrett signed a three-year, $50.5 million deal last week. And in re-upping both, the hope is that a message was sent to everyone else on the kinds of guys Smith and Fontenot plan to reward.

As Smith says, “They’re guys you believe in.”

Even better, now, their contracts are no longer an issue. Which means where Smith and Fontenot started, with six problematic deals on their ledger, they’re now down to just Deion Jones having an over-mortgaged deal.

The young core the Falcons are looking to build is starting to form. Some guys in that mix are holdovers from Quinn and ex-GM Thomas Dimitroff—Lindstrom and Terrell are shaping up to be long-termers in Atlanta. Others are from last year’s draft class, with tight end Kyle Pitts the headliner, and guys like interior offensive lineman Drew Dalman and outside linebacker Ade Ogundeji expected to compete for big roles come summer.

And in the process, the Falcons are starting to feel better about certain position groups, one being the outside linebacker room that Ogundeji inhabits and free-agent signee Lorenzo Carter and draftees Arnold Ebiketie and DeAngelo Malone are joining. That is part of the process Smith talked about in trying to assess his roster.

“You coach the guys,” Smith says. “A lot of guys, you find out they’re going to be patient, and maybe they were fits for other schemes, and now you have a good feel for them and the spots of your roster you have to improve.”

And the draft showed, again, that the Falcons are still just trying to stack good players on the roster. First-rounder Drake London, second-rounders Ebikete and Troy Andersen, and third-rounders Ridder and Malone were all seen as solid values where they went. Which is the idea here.

That will get you back to the quarterback question, too. If Mariota or Ridder is the long-term answer, great. If not, the hope is, after years of building things up, whoever is will walk into a pretty good situation.

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OTAs are next for Smith and his staff, still a couple weeks away, and after that comes minicamp and training camp—talking to the head coach, the excitement for what’s ahead was palpable in his voice.

The makeup of the roster now is such where, he hopes at least, any previous entitlement is on the way out, and coaches will be able to have wide-open position battles everywhere.

“That’s been our mindset from Day 1, it’s just a lot easier to do now when you’re not hamstrung by certain contracts,” Smith says. “I think everybody knows, and in Tennessee that’s one thing we prided ourselves in. I give Vrabel a lot of credit, that team had that, especially the team that made the run in ’19. They knew the best guys were gonna play. It didn’t matter where you came from. We brought that to Atlanta. Guys last year, we got good contributions even out of guys we picked up in the middle of the year.

“Guys know they have a chance and they’re excited about it. So certainly, competition is gonna be everything.”

That’s where Smith can emphasize, again, that there won’t be any creative draft pick management happening in the fall. He’s legitimately excited to see what London and Pitts can do together, and how 2021 revelation Cordarelle Patterson fits into that equation. He’s hopeful on both Mariota and Ridder. He sees personnel on defense that fits coordinator Dean Pees’s scheme better than was the case a year ago.

But at the same time, Smith isn’t ignoring what’s out there. He knows what people think. He also knows his players can see it, too. And they have, already, started to talk about it.

“I’ll never hide from something like that, and I’m not saying that with any bravado,” Smith says. “But yeah, certainly, you’re rebuilding every year in the NFL, that’s why you have a draft, why there’s free agency, you’re never just gonna run it back as it was. If you’re not forward-thinking, if you’re not constantly looking to tweak and improve, you’ll get passed up. That’s what we don’t want to have ever happen.

“So yeah, sure, you can call it whatever you want, you really need to retool or rebuild every year in certain spots. Now, is there some major transition? Yeah, you can make that argument. I think it’s obvious. But this team’s gonna come out, they’re gonna compete like hell, they’re gonna fight, we’ve got good young pieces, and we’re gonna play well together in all three phases as a team. I’m excited about it. This is gonna be a fun team to coach.

Then, Smith pauses and adds, “And we’re not gonna make any excuses about dead money or whatever.”

So yes, the hope is that a year from now, with the books clean, money to spend, and a full complement of draft picks in the holster, all of this will look pretty smart. But there’s still plenty of progress to make between now and then.

And Smith hopes that progress will be measured in where they stand next January, not next April.

NFL’S LATEST MOVE ON THE DIVERSITY FRONT

Credit to the NFL for taking an important step last week in locking down plans to invite high-end, diverse candidates for head coaching and GM jobs to the annual spring meeting in Atlanta for two weeks.

First, we’ll give you some background on the event, which is being spearheaded by the NFL’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Jonathan Beane, with support coming from stakeholders like the Fritz Pollard Alliance.

I can tell you that, for a few years now, one of the biggest frustrations of Black coaches vying for jobs has been a common explanation for why they fell short: that the owner was simply more “comfortable” with another candidate. That’s why, for a while now, a lot of folks (myself included) have advocated for the league to bring promising young assistant coaches and scouts to league meetings to get to meet the real decision-makers in a social, non-interview type setting, so the interview may not be the first time people have met.

The NFL, to its credit, is answering that bell. They’ve discussed the idea going back to last year, and it will go into action through that two-day meeting in Buckhead. Over that time, there will be educational opportunities through seminars on the business side of football and leadership, and also the chance to rub elbows with the owners. Which, as I see it, is a pretty awesome idea. Each team will get to nominate two guys, a coach and a scout, and bring them to Atlanta.

“We’ve heard many comments from people around the league, coaches around the league in particular and ascending executives, about the fact that the pace is not moving fast enough for opportunities,” Fritz Pollard Alliance executive director Rod Graves said to me Saturday. “This initiative is just one in a multi-phased approach that the league and other stakeholders like the Fritz Pollard Alliance are joining in on to really support growth and the enhancement of information.

“I think it’s one of those necessary steps that has to be taken, in-line with others. And one of the key areas that has to be in the foundation of the effort to enhance opportunities is owner buy-in. And owner embrace, that’s really what I want to say. In other words, ownership has to show its support and be open to making these opportunities become real. At the end of the day, there has to be an intentional effort to hire more people of color.

“Without it, all of these efforts are really baseless. But I do believe with the league, the focus on owners is becoming more and more of a priority in this area. If you’ve got that, plus you add in things that make a difference in the growth and even at the grassroots level, I just think in the long run it makes for a healthier league. That’s where we are.”

Now, it’s hard to say what the real impact of the initiative will be when a lot of other efforts have failed to produce results.

But the goal here is pretty straightforward and, seemingly, attainable, and that’s simply to build bridges between owners and rising stars on the football side, the sort that are lacking now because the two groups are rarely together at once (owners can be scarce at the combine, and generally head coaches and GMs are the only ones from the football side to attend owners meetings).

“I hope it’s just a comfort level, really across the spectrum, meaning owners will be more comfortable with the candidates that’ll be spoken about in the future, because now there’s some recognition and familiarity with who those people are,” Graves says. “It certainly improves the chances when you’re talking about candidates—at least people know who they are, and have some familiarity with them. I’m hoping that’s the benefit on both sides, that coaches are more familiar with owners and owners are more familiar with coaches.”

And, sure, you could argue that track record and reputation should matter more than familiarity when it comes to hiring into such important jobs—I’d agree with that. But there’s also no question that, for owners, comfort level has proven to be a factor. It’s a good thing—for everyone—that that’s being addressed.

TEN TAKEAWAYS

I’m not sure I can remember there being such a lush list of free agents this late in the offseason before. Just take a look …

• DE Jadeveon Clowney
• WR Odell Beckham Jr.
• DE Trey Flowers
• WR Julio Jones
• WR Jarvis Landry
• DE Melvin Ingram
• C JC Tretter
• TE Rob Gronkowski
• LT Eric Fisher

And you can toss Justin Houston, Jerry Hughes, Akiem Hicks and Duane Brown into that mix, too. So what gives? Two things, I think. One, teams generally wait until later to sign older free agents, and getting past the deadline for signings to be counted in the comp-pick formula (that was last Monday) is always a factor. Two, all of the above listed guys have already worked on outsized second NFL contracts, so they have the financial flexibility to wait. (Also … maybe if you had that kind of flexibility, you’d wait to go back to work, too?)

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The Steelers aren’t kidding when they say Kenny Pickett is going to have a real chance to start this year. The Pitt product, who will literally just be entering through a different door of the same building to go to practice and meetings now (the Steelers and Pitt share a facility), turns 24 in less than a month. He played in 52 games in college, starting 49 of them, and was Pitt’s full-time starter for four seasons. Bottom line, there’s a reason why his readiness, and translation to the NFL, was seen as perhaps the biggest plus he brought into the pre-draft process. And, realistically, while the Steelers aren’t looking to take a step back this year, and I do think Mike Tomlin will pick the right guy for right now, when you take a quarterback in the first round, you want to be rolling into Year 2, so you can start to take advantage of having him on a rookie contract, and build around him aggressively. Then, there’s Mitchell Trubisky’s contract, which is complicated, and heavily based on the number of snaps he takes. Check it out …

2022
$5.25 million signing bonus
$1.035 million base salary
• Base pay: $6.285 million.

60% playing time: $1 million
70% pt: $1.5 million
80% pt: $2 million
70% pt AND playoffs: $2.5 million
80% pt AND playoffs: $4 million
Pro Bowl incentive: $250,000
• Max incentives: $4.25 million.

2023
$8 million base salary
• Base pay: $8 million.

If 60% playing time in ’22, $1 million roster bonus due in March ’23
If 70% pt in ’22, $4 million roster bonus due in March ’23
• Max (non-guaranteed) roster bonus: $4 million.

60% pt: $1 million
70% pt: $1.5 million
80% pt: $2 million
70% pt AND playoffs: $2.5 million
80% pt AND playoffs: $4 million
Pro Bowl incentive: $250,000
• Max incentive: $4.25 million.

Total base: 2 years, $14.285 million
Max: 2 years, $26.785 million

Add it up, and there’s more incentive there for the Steelers not to play Trubisky, especially since all the playing-time incentives he hits this year will count against the 2023 cap. And so I think there’s a reason why the Steelers, and particularly outgoing GM Kevin Colbert, have messaged that Mason Rudolph has a real shot to start. It’s because they want this to be a from-the-ground-up competition. I believe them when they say it will be. But I also think this has potential to go the way New England’s competition went last year, where the plusses of starting a rookie simply outweigh those of playing the battle-tested vet.

I love what Commanders coach Ron Rivera did for his first-round pick, Jahan Dotson, this weekend. This one started with Dotson going to his receivers coach, Drew Terrell, and mentioning that Penn State’s graduation was on Saturday—and that while it was important to him to be there, he was more than willing to skip it to be a full participant in Washington’s rookie minicamp. Rivera always tells his coaches to send the players to him in such situations, so Terrell did, giving the head coach a heads up it was coming. So Dotson approached Rivera, and Rivera responded that he knew why he was coming to him, and that he thought graduating college was a big accomplishment, and that he wanted to make sure Dotson went, if for no other reason than to do right by his parents. But we have practice, Dotson responded. Rivera told him that, based on the schedule, Dotson could attend the Commanders’ first two minicamp practices, then he’d be excused to head to State College for the ceremony. “First and foremost, it really is about the messaging before anything else,” Rivera told me Sunday. “We sit here and talk about doing things the right way and how important some things are. Rather than being an empty chair, I want to follow up on it. And then, secondly, his mother is dealing with cancer right now, and just thinking, and watching how proud they were when he did his press conference, I could see the pride on their faces, and how important these things are to them as a family, and this was to be considered a really nice family accomplishment as well.” Another thing that didn’t hurt—Rivera saw how much it meant to his two biggest stars in Carolina, Cam Newton and Luke Kuechly, to go back and get their degrees, from Auburn and Boston College, respectively. So he was never going to stand in the way of that. “It’s those cool moments, that these guys, they should be there for,” Rivera continued. “And it’s also saying, in college, I was more than just a football player. I really was a student-athlete. I think that’s cool for those guys.” And really cool of Rivera to make sure Dotson didn’t miss out on that.

While we’re on the draft-eligible quarterbacks for 2022, the relative weakness of the class could well give a boost to the group coming in ’23. And to be clear, it’s really hard to tell at this point how we’ll all look at the group in front of us a year from now—this is like it was going into the 2017, ’19 or 2020 college seasons, where you could pick out two or three quarterbacks, and say with some certainty they’d be first-rounders the following April. But the fact that only one went in the top 70 picks last week means more teams are going into the coming draft cycle with flexibility to take one high next year. And in some cases, you’ll have third-year GMs (Houston, Atlanta) where there might be some urgency to get one. “The reality of the QB position in this draft was evident. Every team passed on the QBs [other than Pickett] multiple times,” says one AFC exec. “Maybe one of these guys hits, but the draft position suggests the league does not have much confidence in that happening. And I would suspect that because the league essentially “skipped” a year in regards to QBs, the market for them in next year’s draft could be crazy.” Whether it winds up being that way, yes, is at least in part going to ride on how C.J. Stroud, Bryce Young, Tyler Van Dyke and a host of others play in the fall. But that 2021 was, in our exec’s words, “skipped” by so many should indeed raise the stakes a year from now.

Value put on premium positions—another tenet of the champion Rams’ approach—was evident again over draft weekend. If you consider there to be five premium spots in today’s NFL—quarterback, left tackle, receiver, edge rusher, and corner—then this draft made you look pretty smart. Those five positions monopolized the top 12 picks, and accounted for 21 of 32 guys to go in the first round. Here’s the breakdown:

Quarterback: 1
Left tackle: 5
Receiver: 6
Edge rusher: 5
Corner: 4

Over the history of the league, those five positions have accounted for every contract worth $20 million per year except three (defensive tackles Aaron Donald, DeForest Buckner and Chris Jones). And if you want to add defensive tackles into the above mix, you can put another two first-round picks on the ledger to get the number to 23. Which says what you know about the direction of team-building in the NFL—GMs and coaches are more focused than ever in trying to maximize the most important spots on the field, believing they can fill out the rest of the roster on the (relative) cheap. In a lot of ways, it’s similar to how Bill Polian built the Colts around Peyton Manning a decade-and-a-half ago. “I think more and more people in charge are understanding value better,” says one NFC exec this week. “The value of the fifth-year option at positions of value like receiver and defensive end versus positions like safety and linebacker and running back are really weighed cautiously, seeing if a player is worth that. Because if you take one that early, very quickly they become top-10 paid at the position. And then, is it worth it?” It’s a really interesting question to ponder, and is illustrated in how we’ve seen guys like Jamal Adams and C.J. Mosley switch teams in their prime in recent years. My guess is, from here, the trend will only get more stark.

I think this is an interesting time for the Raiders … again. Dan Ventrelle was let go last week, and almost immediately alleged that owner Mark Davis fired him for blowing the whistle on, in his words, a “hostile work environment.” Ventrelle also emphasized his effort to “protect … female employees,” a statement that absolutely comes with implications attached to it. There’s no doubt that what went down in Washington will, and should, raise the antennae on the possibility something similar was happening in another NFL buildings. The league is going to investigate it, and we’ll see what comes of that. But there’s no doubt that it’s a pretty sideways year on the business side for the Raiders, after the firing of team president Marc Badain and departure of a rash of employees last summer. Some believed that Ventrelle, the team’s long-time general counsel, had a hand in Badain getting whacked, with his eyes on Badain’s job; and in the aftermath, there were business-side folks who held it against Ventrelle. So there’s obviously a lot to sort through for the Raiders and the league, and it all leaves the club looking for another team president. And as far as I can tell, for what it’s worth, the drama here didn’t really touch football operations much—those guys work separately from the business side in the team’s new facility, and a good percentage of the football side haven’t even been around very long.

Baker Mayfield’s situation is now, and will continue to be, about money. I believe that, if a team was there to take Mayfield like the Panthers did Sam Darnold last year, and give him the starting job and let him go, the Browns would have a taker for his fully-guaranteed, $18.858 million fifth-year option. I also know that, absent that, no one is going to pay that freight, even if such a team wanted Mayfield to compete for its starting job. I think that, ultimately, the timing of the Deshaun Watson trade is what screwed both the Browns and Mayfield on finding the former first overall pick a new home, and it’s reflected in how the league sees Mayfield. The music stopped, and Baker didn’t have a chair to sit in. “I do think he’s a starting-caliber player, no doubt,” one AFC exec told me, just before the Watson trade. “But this ‘franchise guy’ thing, if the guy wasn’t the first pick, if he went in the second or third round, we’d be looking at him so differently. He has that attached to his name, and it’s not reality; he can be one of 32, but have to be comfortable with the idea that he’s gonna be somewhere maybe 16 to 22. Physically, one through 14, you’re talking about guys that are bigger, are better athletes, bigger arms. He’s got a good arm, he’s accurate, but he’s just not one of those top guys. So what are you acquiring then? The 20th-best quarterback? You have to be comfortable with that.” Maybe soon someone will be. Barring injury, it’s not happening at his number. So either the Browns agree to eat more of his money than they have, Mayfield seeks a compromise on what he’s owed, or the deadlock keeps rolling.

One area where Bill Belichick still doesn’t get enough credit is in how he’s helped develop guys on the scouting side. And obviously, the guys who ran that department for 21 years, Scott Pioli and Nick Caserio (and new Raiders GM Dave Ziegler for a year after that), also deserve credit for what’s a really impressive list of alums of the Patriots’ personnel staff. That was highlighted again this week with Ziegler bringing New England national scout Brandon Yeargan aboard as Vegas’s new college scouting director. Here, then, is a list of guys who worked in New England and are now at the director level or higher elsewhere:

• Texans GM Nick Caserio
• Buccaneers GM Jason Licht
• Titans GM Jon Robinson
• Raiders GM Dave Ziegler
• Panthers vice president of player personnel Pat Stewart
• Titans director of player personnel Monti Ossenfort
• Raiders assistant director of player personnel DuJuan Daniels
• Texans assistant director of player personnel James Liipfert
• Raiders college scouting director Brandon Yeargan
• Browns senior executive personnel consultant Bob Quinn

Add to that Dimitroff, who got the Falcons to a Super Bowl, and Matt Russell, who was VP of player personnel for a championship team in Denver, as well as Pioli, who built a roster that Andy Reid won with when he first got to Kansas City, and it’s an impressive group that has passed through Foxboro. And maybe even more so when you consider that Caserio, Ziegler, Stewart, Oseenfort, Daniels, Liipfert, and Yeargan were all there together as recently as the 2018 draft. So where Belichick’s coaching proteges have had issues, the scouts have found a lot more success.

Age was a big topic of conversation in this draft cycle, largely because of how the players in it were affected by the pandemic. Some took advantage of the extra year eligibility the NCAA granted for the COVID year. Others stayed in school for an extra season, after losing a lot of development when things were shut down. One product of that was four players going in the first round who were born in 1998 and, thus, will be 24 by the time the year is out. Those four are:

• Packers DT Devonte Wyatt, born 3/31/98
• Steelers QB Kenny Pickett, born 6/6/98
• Patriots G Cole Strange, born 7/31/98
• Jaguars LB Devin Lloyd, born 9/30/98

By comparison, new Eagle A.J. Brown, traded on draft day, was born June 30, 1997. Some teams, almost by rule, shy away from taking players as old as Wyatt, Pickett, Strange or Lloyd that early in the draft, with the reason being that their development might be more tapped out, and that they could be on the back end by the time they get to a second contract. And you can play the math out with the above four—if those guys get second contracts, and you take the fifth-year option into account, the first new year of those deals will be 2027, the year in which each of them turn 29. Again, by comparison, the first “new” year of Brown’s Eagles deal will be 2023 (since he was a second-rounder). He turns 26 that June.

You want quick hitters to wrap the takeaways? You get quick hitters to wrap the takeaways.

• The Jets took an interesting tack to rookie minicamp this weekend—with the coaches handing the draft picks off to work with the strength and conditioning staff, and doing so for a couple reasons. One, it allowed for a closer look at tryout guys. Second, it kept the draftees, who’ve been training for a track meet the last three months, from getting hurt overexerting themselves. I think it’s a smart move—and prudent too—from Robert Saleh, who was a Jaguars assistant in 2015 when Dante Fowler blew out his ACL at rookie camp.

• One other note from how the Jets did things that I found interesting was that they had the skill guys in 7-on-7, but the big men only in individuals, because they figured they’d get a better evaluation on the individual players that way.

• It’s a little over a week after the draft, and six first-rounders are already signed. I’m happy we don’t have the drama we had pre-2011. And I’d say that drama was good for no one (though guys like Sam Bradford and Ndamukong Suh would probably disagree).

• Lions QB Jared Goff has to be among the biggest winners of draft weekend. He comes out of it locked in as the starter, set to make $26.15 million, and with the prospect of having Jameson Williams join his offense around Halloween. Remember, Goff is still just 27. And there’s a pretty clear opportunity in front of him now.

• Of all the 2023 draft prospects, there were two I heard scouts talking about consistently back in the fall: Alabama edge Will Anderson (who probably would’ve been the first pick this year, if he were draft eligible) and Georgia 3-technique Jalen Carter.

• Cat Raîche’s pending move to Cleveland to Browns GM Andrew Berry’s No. 2 makes a ton of sense. She can fill the void left by now-Vikings GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, having worked in his VP of football operations role in Philly (a role Berry himself once held with the Eagles), and she’s close with Berry.

• If Earl Thomas’s bizarre exit from the Ravens wasn’t going to end his NFL career, it sure looks like this will.

• The Cardinals, the team with the shortest starting quarterback in the NFL, now have three receivers 5′ 9″ or under (Hollywood Brown, Rondale Moore, Andy Isabella). What does it mean? I dunno, other than you gotta be fast around DeAndre Hopkins.

• I’m fascinated to see the reaction the Munich game gets over there in November.

• Pete Carroll said this week that Drew Lock would’ve been the first quarterback taken in this year’s draft, and I’m not sure he’s wrong on that.

SIX FROM THE SIDELINE

1. I’ll be watching the Jordan Addison situation. I had a good exchange with college football insider, Pete Thamel of ESPN, about it the other day, and he made a really interesting point: Addison is the first star player to enter the transfer portal without a coaching change or something else unexpected pressing to leave where he’s at.

2. While we’re there, I love Boston College WR Zay Flowers making the conscious decision to prioritize his future over money right now, and stay where he’s at to get a degree and try and win with his teammates. And I say that without any malice towards those who do take the fast money, because everyone’s situation is different.

3. The Bruins are, as always, pretty tough. They didn’t look like they could skate with the Hurricanes in Games 1 and 2. And now it’s 3–3.

4. I hope Ja Morant is only missing Game 4. Seeing him go out because of an injury would be no good.

5. I can’t tell if people are seriously into Formula 1 this much or not.

6. Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there, and especially my wife and my mom. I can’t even imagine where I’d be right now without my mom’s undying confidence and belief in me—when I had no right to expect anyone to believe in me. And I’m really lucky to have a mom for my kids who’s the same way. Love you both.

BEST OF THE NFL INTERNET

No they do not.

Honestly, anyone upset over Tannehill’s comments probably needs to go for a walk. A long one.

Big one.

The Raiders were ready for this. And the Raiders pounced.

Mike McDaniel is one of a kind.

F1, again, brought out all the stars.

Looks tiny, no doubt.

I’ve always been a sucker for these, and this is a good one.

Great technique—eyes on the belt buckle, knees bent, feet chopping, and drive through. Only problem was he failed to wrap up (although it clearly wasn’t a problem here).

Furthest West the Steelers go in 2022: Indianapolis.

This is a Dotson reference and I’m for it.

Two greatest athletes of my lifetime there. And where did they meet up? An F1 race, of course.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

The NFL named its new game officials last week, and in the group is the first-ever Asian-American to join the club—Lo van Pham. And he has quite a story, having grown up as a Vietnamese refugee, bouncing around camps from Laos to Thailand to the Philippines before his family won a lottery run by Catholic missionaries to move to Texas.

It’s a great story, and you should check it out. See you guys this afternoon with the MAQB.

More NFL Coverage:

• What the NFL Didn’t Reveal About Its Browns Investigation
• Biggest Draft Takeaways From Around the NFL
• The NFL Just Approved a Manual for ‘Legal Tanking’
• Bryce Young, C.J. Stroud Possible Next No. 1 Pick

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