The New Silly Season

how is washington gonna be able to persue reggie wayne? they are 20 million over on the cap. itd take alot of releasing and restructuring..

Does anyone know if the OT position is really strong overall. I’ve been following the top 4 OT in the draft they all seem to have positive qualities that would upgrade at least the right side and hope the flo comes back to man the left tackle position. I know Mel Kiper grades the position. Does anyone else know what the Saftey position in this years draft is like deep or shallow. Mahalo everyone. Super Bowl this week and the Pro Bowl in Hawaii, will be going, by the way its 83 degrees where I’m at, Mai Tai’s for everyone…..LOL

Rafael,

Have you heard anything about the NFL Network televising the combine? I believe that they might. On demand has last years combine, so maybe that is a precursor to what is to come. I would sure like to see some of these players taking part of the drills.

Right now I still think Carpenter will be our 1st selection, unless we can move up. I am really starting to like Charles Spencer (OG from Pitt) as our 2nd.

Carpenter will be a second round player, Philly will take Greenway, I think we’ll take a tackle or trade the pick.

I keep hearing a lot about Reggie Wayne. Everything I have read indicates that he will be the Colts top off season priority and that they have no intention of letting him go. They will let the Edge walk before him. If I’m Reggie Wayne, I think I would stick with Peyton & Dungy before going to play with either the Bears or Redskins QBs.

These draft boards are way hard to predict right now. The only thing I think we know for sure is that Jonathan Scott definitely has the Cowboys eye. Interesting that two of these draft boards have McNeill so high when most every source I have seen lists Scott as the 3rd best OT in the draft behind Ferguson and Justice. I don’t see how McNeill could rank higher than Scott after Senior Bowl week and with McNeill’s back problems. I am a believer in the OT in the 1st round unless Scott is gone now though.

coachp:
There’s talent at OT, there’re 4 unquestionable first day signees (D’Brick, Justice, Scott and McNeill) and you can also find three others that are probable (Trueblood, Whitworth and Winston). But Brick, Scott, Justice, Winston and Trueblood only played LT in College and we should all know that playing Left isn’t the same than playing right and there’s a big chance that they won’t start right away.

Safety has a lot of depth, as much as there’s the chance that the level of a second rounder could be comparable to the one of a 4th rounder.

Safety, CB, TE and OT are unquestionably the positions with most adequate depth in this Draft.

BTW, isn’t it funny that we all heard from Seattle 2 weeks ago that they were going to play Carolina just as Dallas played them and now we’re hearing the same coming from Pitt… That kind of says something out of what Bill’s building with the team we all love.

EricR,

I don’t have the NFL network so I don’t follow their programming.

nfl.com and peter king are saying Danny Boy Snyder and the Deadskins will enter the TO sweepstakes. While I am sure the beagles would prefer not to face TO twice a year……who knows what danny boy will give up for him.

I heard the NFL Network is taking over the Thursday Night and Saturday Day games that start late in the year after NCAA FB reg season concludes……..if so i might have to consider satellite…….all that money they paid to the networks the nfl built its own network and now has games too? Talk about a monopoly.

Joey Porter was a 3rd Pick in 99….kind of the parcells prototypical LB 250 6-3"…..gets 8-10 sacks a season……..couple ints and 70 tkls……..i would take a player like that in round 3 if they still exist. Is it just me or are guys like Carpenter shooting up the draft a lot higher with all these 3-4 defenses now???

Sterling…….i agree with you on R Wayne……Harrison is an old man by NFL standards…….and Wayne is the obvious future

Jon,

The Redskins are in with the Broncos and Chiefs as teams going all in this coming year. They’re looking at getting a 2nd WR.

And they can get T.O. Consider this: The Eagles at best right now get a 6th or a 7th.

But what if Snyder offers a 3rd? What do you do if you’re the Eagles? If you cut him, he could wind up in Washington anyway.

Do you simply decide that you’ll take less and move him to the AFC, or that you’ll leverage Washington and hope he poisons them too.

Somebody, I forgot who, mentioned how Owens had destroyed locker rooms in San Francisco and Philly. If he were to do the same in D.C., it would be the Cowboys fans trifecta.

Gotta agree with you there rafael. Id love to see them give up there last day 1 pick and get TO. Not that I want to face him twice, but we’ve done it before.

Rafael:

That was me, I said a while back that if T.O. went to the Redskins and blew their locker room up he should be considered for the first honorary non-Cowboy spot in the Ring Of Honor by virtue of destroying three of our biggest enemies from within.

One question I have regarding your Redskins scenario is if the Eagles can’t consummate a deal because they don’t want him in the NFC and no AFC teams put a trade offer on the table, then if T.O. gets waived, doesn’t he have to clear waivers before becoming a FA, or would he automatically become a FA?

My understanding is that he could be claimed off waivers by a team under his current contract terms. Since the waiver wire works similar to the draft order, couldn’t a team higher on the draft order claim him and then hold him as trade bait for an NFC team (Redskins) to try to get an extra draft pick? Especially since, as Rafael has pointed out, his trade value is likely so low (except for perhaps from Dan Snyder).

This kind of thing happened with the Ravens and T.O. as I recall. I am pretty sure the Ravens ended up getting some kind of compensation out of the deal because T.O. wouldn’t come to terms with them after the 49ers tried to trade him. I don’t recall the specifics though.

I like the kid from Penn State. That pains me to say it because I’m a HUGE Ohio State fan. Can the Tamba Ali play a OLB in a 3-4 Defense. He’s only 6’2 250lbs. Isn’t that small for a 3-4 DE.

Sterling,

Claiming him would be too risky since you could get stuck with him. If he was cut however, look at the teams interested in him and their draft orders. The Redskins pick 22nd, though Denver has their spot, Denver 29th, Dallas 18th, Kansas City 20th and Miami 16th.

The Dolphins are interested. And Drew Rosenhaus would soil himself if this came to pass because he’s an unabashed Dolphins fan. I’m sure the one and only team to get a T.O. discount would be them.

p.s. PLEASE!!! do not draft Gabe Watson. That guy is awful. I’ve watched him for 4 years and he stinks! Nick Mangold stoned him the entire game. I don’t care if he’s laying there in the 1,2 or 3rd. TERRIBLE..

That is all…

How can the redskins get any free agents when they dont have any cap room. From my under standing they still have to redo about 12 contracts just to sign there own free agents.

Rafael:

It all sounds like it is going to be one big bluffing match between owners, GM’s, coaches, and Rosenhaus. Who blinks first and makes the trade? Or do the Eagles get their bluff called and end up having to release him with no compensation? Does any team dare to claim him off waivers without knowing if he’ll play for them? Media manipulation, head games…and no one has had to get down to negotiating his new contract yet. This should be at least another two month T.O. soap opera again.

My guess now is that we trade down and take either Jon Scott or Bobby Carpenter, depending on whose there. I’d be happy with either one.

trading down is just not an option when you have the 18th pick. This basically gurantees either a steal from someone who missed a player in the top ten or a player who is an unknown that most charts didn’t have on their list and we get him for cheap. I know our line was dismal at times but I don’t think OT is the way to go, remember we get flozell the hotel back, and petititi or what ever his name is going to be battling jacob rogers for his position. No matter how bad he did you have to put this season on the belt and learn from it. Trust me, not every offensive tackle looks back on every season and says to himself" man I dominated every single aspect of the game and had no mistakes" he’s a rookie, hopefully he puts a little bite on his facemask and comes out better next year. Marco rivera is getting pretty old and I’d like to see gurode in the starting lineup, he’s just a bigger center and the whole exchange between bledsoe and the center needs to be 100%. Larry allen should be coming back for about two more years which remember when flozell and him were in tact we had a pretty nice record.

I wouldn`t say trading down is noy an option. If BP`s main pick is off the 1st 25 list than why not move a few slots down & possibly pick up an extra 3rd or 4th pick.
I do agree I would not go OT with first pick. I would try to make my defense dominate. I would either go with OLB or Safety . These are 2 areas where we need much help. I agree Petiti will be much better & hopefully Rivera will play up to his salary. Plus with Flozell back. I still say we need help there but in order to compete for a championship you need a shutdown “D”.

Jesse NY:

The only thing about trying to trade down is finding a trading partner. That’s where the Cowboys might have trouble. Since we just missed the playoffs, the teams below us are half NFC playoff teams and not likely to want to deal with us because we’re up and comers. Likewise, we don’t want to help out the other NFC playoff teams to get their guy when they will be our playoff competitors next season. The only way to trade down a few slots is to find an AFC team to swap with and that will also give us a 3rd or 4th rounder in return as you suggest. Would the Bengals, Colts, Chargers, or Jags do this? Possibly, but they would have to really be desperate to get the player at #18. That’s the part I don’t see happening. If that player is worth moving up for, he’s probably a player we would want to pick anyway.

Sterling:

True all the pieces would have to fit for this to happen. But if a corner or TE or some position we do not really need is sought after why not. Remember BP has had great success in 2nd through 4th rounds in his career.Most of his best players came in later rounds.All I am saying is if he can grab an extra pick & still get his man, why not !

If L. White is there I say grab him he
will make our line problems go away….

hes gonna play rt?

No but instead of trying to get a Hof
lineman at every spot on the O-line he
can make the line look a whole lot better.

Sterling,

I wouldn’t be overly concerned about NFC teams not wanting to help the Cowboys. If one of them wants to trade up, it would be because they are anxious to get a player they believe will help their team. They won’t be too concerned about giving the Cowboys an extra, lower pick. Division teams are often unwilling to trade, but not conference teams.

There was only one intra-division trade last year. That was the one between the Eagles and Cowboys, for Canty.

But there were over a dozen intra-conference trades: Buccaneers/Rams, Chiefs/Dolphins, Eagles/Forty-Niners, Eagles/Packers, Jaguars/Jets, Jets/Raiders, Panthers/Seahawks, Patriots/Raiders, Patriots/Ravens, Packers/Panthers, Raiders/Texans, and Redskins/Vikings. Together with the Cowboys/Eagles trade, that made 14 of the 22 total draft-week trades.

Having said that, it is easy for us to speculate about moving down (or up), but it is not always easy to do, if the team wants to maintain some semblance of equity in trade value. Sometimes that phone just doesn’t ring, and your own best efforts don’t bear fruit. It’s not because they are afraid of the Cowboys, though; they are just not interested enough in any single player to move up to get him.

Mr. Bill:

My point was more that we are the ones that are not going to want to help out another NFC team, especially a playoff team. If the other team was so anxious or desperate to try to cut a deal with us for whatever player is on the board, that implies they are worried that either the Chargers or Chiefs are going to take them, otherwise they would cut a deal with one of those teams. If that’s the case, the other NFC team better call with one hell of an offer, which is not too likely to happen since they aren’t going to want to give us a good pick that could help us improve too much (ie – 1st day or 4th). Otherwise, why wouldn’t we let the Chargers or Chiefs take the player from them instead and deprive them of getting their guy? Getting an extra late 2nd day pick will likely not be worth giving our competition the 1st rounder they want who could haunt us for years to come.

As I recall the Canty deal with the Eagles was a 2nd day trade. I was surprised that happened at the time, but I suspect our sad performance in 2004 helped us get that deal. The Eagles were probably taking us lightly after that season. That won’t be the case with any NFC team in this draft.

Sterling,

If the Cowboys wish to trade down, it is because they are not particularly interested in any player available to them. If that is so, why should they care who gets any of them? If they were worried about a player becoming a super star, why not just take him? After all, how many positions do the Cowboys have that are so loaded that they would not take a potential super star?

I don’t see the worry about a player haunting us, when we don’t play other (non-divisional) NFC teams on an annual basis, and are only assured of playing them every three years. Again, if he’s that worrisome, he’s good enough to draft by us.

Drafting is a difficult enough process, without worrying whether your actions will help a team like Chicago, or not.

Mr. Bill:

You made my point. If the player is that good we would take them ourselvesand not trade at all, if they aren’t we would draft the player we really do want. If the player we really do want is assured to be on the board by trading down we would try to, but why would anyone want to give up another draft pick if the player we are passing on is not good enough to pick up ourselves? We have two or three AFC teams picking right after us with very similar needs as we have, and they could just as easily be willing to trade down. So why would an NFC team help us or vice versa?

Trading down or up works well under certain situations, NFC/AFC draft orders, and if you have a pick that isn’t so close to the middle of the draft order. The two best scenarios would be if you are either at the top of the order or at the bottom, and a lot depends on the depth of the draft class as well. I heard something about the Colts trading up with us to get a RB. The problem with that theory is that even if a LenDale White falls to our spot (which I doubt) and we don’t pick him, there are the Chiefs, Chargers, Pats, Skins, Bucs, Bengals right behind us, all of which are set at that position. The Colts could easily wait until the Giants pick to try to trade up. I just don’t see the Cowboys trading down from this position unless we trade out of the 1st round entirely, which I also don’t see happening. I could see us trading up before we trade down.

Sterling,

… but why would anyone want to give up another draft pick if the player we are passing on is not good enough to pick up ourselves? …

Because every team has a different draft board. Obviously, teams have different needs. They also have widely differing evaluations of players. A player we think is second-round material might be just the player that Chicago thinks will get them to the Super Bowl and keep them there for years.

You are arguing as though there is only one ranking that every team uses. Yet, a player ranked highly on one team’s draft board might have been completely removed from another. Sure, a team will have groupings of players who are given a similar, or even the same, grade. But, what makes you think that each team has the same players in that group, or even has a grouping there at all?

Every team has its own scouting department and builds its own draft board from its own player evaluation. While they often use scouting services for an initial take, they actually look at the players themselves to get their final grades. The process of building a draft board takes a full week, as players are ranked and lists merged. They also flag and even remove players for various reasons. The odds of any two teams coming up with identical draft boards is about as great as finding two identical snowflakes.

Mr. Bill,

You didn’t add that the nature of drafting encourages teams to be more daring in preparing their boards. The way to maximize value is to find that one really good player whom other teams overlook and correctly rate him higher than everybody else.

To win you need to do this REGULARLY. So some organizations will roll the dice more often. When you’ve got a real scouting edge, as Dallas did in the late ‘60s and early ’70s, you profit from this boldness when you take a Calvin Hill in round one when everybody else is laughing at you because he went to Yale and they don’t think Ivy Leaguers are first round material.

OTOH, look at Jerry in the ’90s. Taking chances on guys with great potential like Kavika Pittman and Shante Carver. But it was potential only he could see and it got him burned.

Another part of the game is learning who the rubes are and dealing with them. When he was cleaning up in the early ‘90s, Jimmy Johnson had rating of the other teams ratings systems. There were teams he didn’t trust and if he heard they had a player he liked rated highly, he would have his scouts reevaluate the player to make sure they were not making the same mistake.

All these factors work to make trades and differences all the more likely. So you’re right, even if we find a year such as ’98, where there was consensus on how the top 15 or 20 would go, there will always be different needs.

Man I love this time of year.

Of course! Teams, or rather whoever is running their drafts, have widely divergent opinions as to how to negotiate a draft. Whether to draft by need or best player or some combination? Whether to look for trades or stay put? Whether to take chances or avoid risks? How to assess medical and/or off-field problems? How much does a player’s intelligence play in selections? Is the team built on speed or size? Is their a position they would refuse to take in the first round? Is there a position they favor? Do they emphasize offense or defense? How is special-teams play factored in? Would they even consider a kicker or punter? If so, how high?

All of these things, and many more, are part of the whole draft process, in addition to straight player evaluation.

Strange things often happen on draft day. They are ‘strange’ only because we don’t have insight into what teams are thinking. We can only go by what the Mel Kipers of the world are telling us, which has little bearing on what the teams are actually doing. In my opinion, if the ‘gurus’ get it right, it’s only by coincidence.

Mr. Bill:

I understand fully the discrete variables in drafting and the disperate nature of team by team draft boards. I never questioned this, nor was I trying to oversimplify the process. Obviously drafting players is a permutative function and thus the probabilities are very much against any draft expert getting anywhere close to making correct picks beyond the first two or three. All it takes is one team reaching or drafting for a different need than the “experts” had thought they would and the whole mock draft is blown up along with altering a large number of teams’ draft boards. When quality players inexplicably or unexplainably fall it can throw a wrench in the whole system and possibly make teams do things they wouldn’t ordinarily. Aaron Rodgers last year is a good example, but also an example of a playoff team not having to trade up to get a player that (presumably) ranked high on their board going in. It is an evaluative process that depends on qualitative analysis and is subject to all the shortcomings of this.

I understand all of that, my point is that the ability of the Cowboys to find a trading partner from 2 spots beyond the middle point in the round is limited by the willingness of other teams to make a move up for fear of losing a player to the teams just after the Cowboys pick. Because the teams that pick right after us have a lot of similarities to the Cowboys (perhaps that is partially why the Chiefs and Chargers games were so close with us?), then the likelihood of them taking a player that we might pass on is equally low. Therefore it is safe to assume that a team 3 to 5 picks below us could be offered the same or slightly less generous deal by the team wanting to trade up and still be assured of getting their guy. The Cowboys are not assured of this necessarily because the 4 teams picking after us have such similar needs, etc. The teams picking right after them are in similar positions, and although you can’t completely rule out intra-conference trades amongst playoff teams in the 1st round, the probabilities are strongly against it for reasons I have previously outlined in other posts. The draft is as much about gamesmanship as every other facet of the NFL, and with a relative parity in the league currently, I can only see that being more marked in this draft. Any edge may be the difference between being the Seahawks this year, or the Eagles last season.