SPORTS MONDAY 05/04/20
NFL Post-Draft Edition Redux
GMs and Odds & Ends
Welcome to the first Sports Monday of May!
While I thought all had been said about the 2020 NFL Draft, we got some fascinating insight over the past week about what went on in the minds of GM’s through the draft process. It turns out they were thinking some of the same things we were saying.
To review our post-draft analysis, listen to the SPORTS MONDAY NFL Post-Draft Edition Podcast, which is now much more concise than the live version thanks to Ethan’s editing.
Today I focus on the 49ers’ John Lynch and the Bills’ Brandon Beane, in their own words, and the words of close team observers. I’ll wrap it up with some odds and ends.
San Francisco 49ers GM John Lynch
Hot off the presses comes an interview by Sports Illustrated Monday Morning Quarterback (MMQB) writer Albert Breer, John Lynch Goes Inside the 49ers’ Blueprint to Get Back to the Super Bowl. The lede:
“John Lynch isn’t positive who coined the line, but he sure heard it a lot from his old coach, and Kyle Shanahan’s old boss, Jon Gruden. The ex-Bucs czar said it time and again after his team in Tampa reached the mountaintop 17 years ago, and came back to it plenty after that: You never stay the same.
“For Lynch and Shanahan, and the Niners brass, all these years later, those have become words to live by.”
In other words, the moment Niners’ brass were done licking their Super Bowl wounds, they went to work getting better, under some significant constraints.
It started with DeForest Buckner.
“The Niners had kept Armstead and Buckner, their 2015 and ’16 first-round picks, together for as long as they were able to. A cap crunch loomed, as more big deals had to be accounted for on the horizon, for young stars like George Kittle and Bosa. Armstead had just played out the fifth-year option on a rookie deal, while Buckner was reaching his.
““We knew the Buckner domino was going to be the big one,” Lynch said.”
When it became clear they couldn’t keep Buckner, they gave him and his agent blessing to find a trade for a first rounder.
“Not only did he bring back a first-round pick, he brought back the 13th pick,” Lynch said. “And then, it’s like, ‘Whoa, I didn’t think he’d do that.’ By that point, you start looking at how we can keep our team together. And I guess a long story short, it’s not something we wanted to do, but at a certain point, we felt like that was the best decision.”
Now, what to do with that 13th pick? Joe Staley was the wildcard. When the Niners picked Kinlaw and not Wirfs with their first pick after trading back one spot, we figured Staley was giving it a go for one more season. Not until the news broke early on Day 3 about the acquisition of Williams did we learn we were wrong.
With Breer’s and Lynch’s help, we can now appreciate the magnitude of the risk the 49ers took. They might well have ended up without a starting left tackle, a disastrous outcome. However, as the saying goes, luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
“Two relationships became critical: one with Staley, and the other with Washington coach Ron Rivera. In the case of the former, Staley keeping his plans quiet during the first and second days of the draft helped the Niners keep chatter on their newly-urgent need to a minimum. In the case of the latter, trust between Lynch and Rivera would prove integral. And that really started with Lynch calling Rivera, telling him he’d like to get a deal for Trent Williams done before the draft, and Rivera having to come back with bad news before Round 1.”
The answer was no, not before the draft. Which left Lynch and Shanahan in a pickle.
“So here’s the first place where Lynch’s faith in Rivera came into play. The tackles didn’t come off the board quite as the Niners expected. Lynch felt strongly that Iowa’s Tristan Wirfs, Georgia’s Andrew Thomas and Alabama’s Jedrick Wills would be gone by the time San Francisco got on the clock, and maybe Louisville’s Mekhi Becton would be there.
“Instead, Wirfs, who the Niners had “ranked incredibly high,” per Lynch, was there for them at 13, as a potential long-term answer at tackle, with the Williams situation still in a state of flux. San Francisco could take Wirfs and find peace in not having to worry that the Shanahan/Williams reunion (Williams was Mike’s first draft pick in Washington to kick off their four years together) would come undone. But also on the board was South Carolina defensive tackle Javon Kinlaw, whom the Niners earmarked before Day 1 as their top guy among those likely to make it to 13, and someone for whom they’d stay at 13.”
The trade with the Bucs to move back one place gave the Niners a crucial extra draft pick to bargain with, which they promptly used in the trade that brought them Shanahan’s WR1, Aiyuk.
“By that point, what I’d tell you is, I wouldn’t say it was a great deal of confidence, but we knew we were in the Trent Williams thing,” Lynch said. “We knew that we’d have a shot. And you start looking, What are some of the reasons we were in the Super Bowl last year? Well, I think when we were right, when we were healthy, we overwhelmed people with our defensive front. And you don’t want to lose that, and we lost a key piece of it.”
Day 2 for Niner’s fans was simply a matter of wait and see. That’s nothing compared to the tension of waiting in the front office.
“Previous maneuvering left the Niners with no picks in the second and third rounds, and the Williams trade twisting in the wind.”
Day 2 was just kind of a long day,” Lynch said.
“San Francisco’s offer for Williams on Friday, its 5 this year and a 3 next year, didn’t change, in part because it couldn’t change much. The 5 was the highest 2020 pick they had, and adding it to the 3 nudged the Niners past what they believed was the field for Williams…
“Rivera called on Saturday morning, paying off the trust that Lynch and Co. had shown in him to keep his word to them. Williams would be a Niner.”
With that move, the 49ers won the draft, doing as well as anyone could have possibly imagined. It turns out that the first move was the hardest.
“It was agonizing, it really was,” Lynch said. “It was tremendously agonizing and for a lot of reasons. It’s why, as much as anything we’re eager to get back, to talk to our players, to let them know. Kyle and I, it’s been very important, our word means everything. So when you profess to guys, Hey, you do the things we ask, we’re gonna take care of you, and then a guy like DeForest does everything, and you can’t take care of him, that’s difficult.
“But you get paid to make real tough decisions. And leadership, it’s not always the popular decision. It’s what you think is the right decision.”
Buffalo Bills GM Brandon Beane
Brandon Beane’s post-draft press conference was certainly less intimate than Lynch’s SI interview. But it revealed plenty nonetheless.
On how the board played out for the Bills:
“I didn’t necessarily go in and say, ‘Hey, we can start taking kickers and backup quarterbacks’ and things like that. It was more of what was on the board. A lot of it is an unknown. Teams value different positions, different players and different spots. The thing about this draft was that the first round was the first round, but the first two rounds for us, Friday night in Rounds 2 and 3, our board, especially going into the third, was getting cleaned out more than you would anticipate it happening.”
Matt Parrino writing for Syracuse.com offers insight. On A.J. Epenesa:
“After Epenesa had a poor showing at the scouting combine it would have been understandable if the Bills moved him down their board. But Beane got to know the player, meeting with him in Indianapolis, and saw the competitive streak. That type of trait plays in Western New York. Beane told Epenesa after he drafted him that he didn’t know why he fell in the draft but he was going to fit in in Buffalo.”
“The first thing I said to him was: ‘I don’t know why you fell.’ There could be different reasons,” Beane said. “Sometimes guys, it just happens to be a run on other players. Maybe some people feel he doesn’t fit what they’re doing. We saw those mocks (where Epenesa went in the first round) and we definitely thought he’d go higher. We feel fortunate that he was there. I told him, ‘Everything happens for a reason. Buffalo’s a lot like Iowa. You’re gonna fit right in here. You’re gonna love our fans; you’re gonna love our city.’”
My take: Epenesa seems like the kind of player who will carry that chip on his shoulder into every game. That’s great motivation for an athlete.
After A.J., Beane’s attention immediately turned to his next prize target — Utah running back Zack Moss.
“If we got a guy sticking out on our board and we have a need,” Beane explained. “I’m gonna try and go get him.”
Parrino picks up the story.
“Moss is 5-foot-9, 223-pound punishing back with great vision and balance. The top five backs went off the board in the first two rounds and a sixth, Boston College’s A.J. Dillon, was drafted in the second round also. Beane noticed a mini run on backs happening shortly after his pick in the second. So in typical Beane fashion, he decided to start making calls about a trade.”
“It wasn’t gonna be anything crazy,” he said. “But we were talking to teams, maybe even seven ahead of us, for a late Saturday pick. But teams just kept picking and there was a lot of talk about people wanting to get out of there. But then we got there and nobody wanted to get out of the pick.”
“Beane admitted that had he lost out on Moss he probably wouldn’t have been in a much different mood at the press conference. That’s because the Bills had a much higher grade on Moss than the pick they were set to pick at in the third round. As much as the Bills wanted him there wasn’t much to be done. In the end the player is headed to Buffalo and Beane landed his target.”
“Patience paid off even though my patience was struggling,” he said.
Beane on drafting QB Jake Fromm in the fifth round from Chris Brown, Buffalo Bills.com:
“We didn’t set out to draft a quarterback, but you set your board and you honor it,” said Beane. “When a guy is sticking out like that, quarterback is the most premium position there is in football. So when you’ve got a guy with a good grade, you take a shot on him. Jake is very smart. He’s a winner.”
Mentality heading into Day 3
“We won’t reach out of the round. If I’ve got a guy at the mid four and at the bottom of four, I might lean to need. Especially if it’s on that I think this guy is gonna have a bigger impact immediately,” Beane said. “These first couple of picks, I was gonna truly sit there and pick best player. The running back was probably the bigger need of the two if you want to compare that but there were other guys that came off too that would have been in the mix. It was an easy decision with Zack.”
Beane on drafting for need and drafting the best player available
“Those first four [picks] were all the highest guys on our board, to be honest with you. After that, we started looking at need to what was there. When we picked a kicker with our first [sixth round pick], there were some other positions that we had as similar as Tyler. We were going to sign a kicker after the draft if we didn’t draft one, and we’re just like, ‘Man, we’ve given the kid this value and if he’s a good player, he had a really good Senior Bowl week, why wouldn’t we take a shot here?’ And then Hodgins, we had a pretty good grade on him. He was the highest guy on our board, but he was equal with at least two others, that I can say. And then Jackson was a need pick all the way. We needed to add a corner at that point, so we grabbed him.”
The trade that didn’t happen
Brandon Beane dropped a hint that intrepid reporters were bound to follow up on. Syracuse.com’s Ryan Talbot took up the challenge, starting with tweets courtesy of Sal Capaccio of WGR-550:
Sal Capaccio 🏈
✔
@SalSports
The Bills made zero trades in this draft. However, interesting from Beane: Said they had a deal worked out with an NFC team 3–4 spots ahead of them for a player they were targeting, but then he went off the board.
Beane added some extra information on WGR-550 on Monday morning.
Sal Capaccio 🏈
✔
@SalSports
“Beane says on @WGR550 it was an OL the Bills were targeting and about to trade up for with an NFC team, but that he went right before that, so they didn’t do the deal.
“Using this information, let’s try to solve the mystery,” writes Talbott.
ODDS AND ENDS
- Final Draft Grades: Our grades were consistent with the so-called experts. A to A- for the 49ers, B+ to B for the Bills.
- It runs in the family: My nephew Max has his own post-draft analysis on Instagram. Check it out!
- NFL Schedules released Friday: That will give us a whole new set of things to talk about even though everything is being set in sand.
- Turning to the NBA: The league announced they are indefinitely postponing indefinitely lottery selection and therefore the draft itself. The issue is how to finish this season, which will determine draft order. Many proposals being floated. I’m sure we’ll have lots to say once they decide what they’re doing.
- Happy Star Wars Day!
