GunnerBill

He is a 3rd round grade for me. Javon Baker on a 2nd/3rd borderline is my best WR available. I don't mind the idea of Burton. It is a tad early for him at #60 for me given what else is on the board. I think they'd go Fiske.

No skin off my nose I'd have offered them to @Virgil for the Bills poll in any event: 2 RBs - Brooks and Benson 1 TE - Sanders 1 IOL - Haynes 2 DTs - Fiske and Jenkins 3 EDGE - Trice, Braswell and Isaac 2 CBs - Tampa and James 1 S - Bullock

Josh and Diggs have been basically done with each other for over a year. Maybe we find out one day what caused the relationship that was once so tight to fracture so badly. But the reality is they both put on a brave face and praised each other through gritted teeth last year. Josh was 100% on board with the decision to move on and indeed I suspect he was even encouraging it.

The thing is the media has to be able to stand up stories. I am sure they had all heard the same stuff about the Allen - Diggs relationship that a lot of us had. Some of them have been shared on this board over the last year or so. But the media can't just throw rumours out there. When your sources tell you stuff off the record it is off the record and if you can't substantiate it elsewhere you can't print it... or at least you take risks when you do. The number of questions that the beat guys asked both Allen and Diggs about it last summer is sufficient proof to me that they knew but both players were publicly still giving it the "brothers" line. What did you want them to do? Accuse both players of lying based on things they had been told off the record?

I have 21 firsts and 5 1st/2nd borderlines. As a reminder I had 11 firsts in 2023. Safe to say I like this class a lot more. EDIT: should add we have had 10 guys picked already I have round 3 grades on. But none that I think are completely ridiculous picks. And one pick (my own) on a guy I haven't graded for my board.

With 11 picks left in round 2, I have 12 second round grades still on the board.

He is the Khalil Shakir or this class. Doesn't run routes and coming out of a funky kinda gimmick college offense. But you are right it is a sneaky need for Philly and he would offer something different as a YAC option than Smith and AJ Brown.

Yep. There is limited stuff to look at. I haven't graded him for my board but in this thought exercise I think he makes a ton of sense for the Rams.

With the 52nd pick in the 2024 TSW Mock Draft 1.0, the Los Angeles Rams select: Kiran Amegadjie, Offensive Tackle, Yale The Philadelphia Eagles and @HappyDays are back on the clock. When I woke up this morning and looked at the picks last night I was seven selections away from going on the clock. I had a board of basically three players that I wanted at this pick and Amegadjie was 2nd of the three but is the only one still available. The Rams have tried veteran Ty Nsekhe and converted guards Joe Noteboom and Alaric Jackson at left tackle since the retirement of Andrew Whitworth after the 2022 season. None of those experiments has been particularly successful. Amegadjie is hardly coming from a football powerhouse and it is a big step up to the NFL but the limited tape I have seen of him he is a proper NFL prospect. He has elite length, is uber aggressive in his blocking and even when he is beaten early in the rep can flip his hips and fight back through it to regain the upper hand. He has some experience of playing guard too if the Rams wanted to slow play this by giving him a year there to get his feet wet before throwing him into the premium spot on the line to protect his Quarterback's blindside. This is a big, long, athletic, mauler of a blocker and if he can make that jump to the pro game he has the attributes to be a top 10 tackle.

I like McCormick too. The Jones I was looking at was Elijah from BC but I'm not totally sold on him as a Bills fit.

I think the feet stopping thing - and you are right that is a tendency of his - is also linked to the lack of precision in his route running. To me on longer developing plays he often finishes his route and then sort of stops to adjust to where the route should have finished rather than where it did.

On the Diggs stuff my question for Houston is still "do they have a #1?" And it is the question we were asking here as recently as last week. If Diggs was just banged up / disenchanted / not featured so much in Joe B's offense and can round back to form then they absolutely do. If he is slightly on the decline I still think they are in a bit of a no-mans land where they have two very good #2s in Collins and Diggs and they have Tank who I think is a stud but isn't an archetypal #1. There is no doubt they have a nice balance though - Collins as the vertical guy, Diggs as the route runner and Tank as a speedster and YAC guy who can play from the slot. It is one of the better WR groups in the league if they can all stay healthy. And on asking for videos I think I'll stick with the cutups and streaming services. I imagine the shipping costs to the UK would make that an expensive do! And my draft fandom is separate to my Bills fandom. Sure it's fun to think about who the Bills might take, but team building strategy is the thing that makes the NFL so fascinating to me. So trying to find out how and what teams are thinking through the way they draft is really interesting.

Like the player but if they draft yet another running back in the first three rounds I might send Beane a sweary letter.

I think if Thomas is there at #28 you HAVE to take him. Trading back would not be for me in that scenario.... but if we pretend for a moment you'd never told us he was there..... then the trades back from #28 and #60 and then your first 5 player selections would be very much a win for me. I'm more mixed on your later round guys but they are shots in the dark to an extent anyway.

If we drafted Jacksaint in round 4 I'd start a fire Beane thread instantly.

It was EXACTLY what we were discussing. You seem to recall me arguing McKenzie was a stud or something which was certainly never my position. It was that he was best placed to start in 2022 and would win the competition and start at slot (my original position was actually you'd see something of a jobshare with Crowder due to their differing skillsets but that McKenzie would take the lion share of the snaps because he separated better and Crowder would likely get hurt - that took about 3 games to come to pass). You were arguing not only that McKenzie shouldn't start, but that he wouldn't. He did. And we agreed at the time that career year was not a particularly high bar and that is why I set 500 yards as a target projection. He fell 77 yards short of that. That was the only extent within that conversation to which I was wrong.

And he was a starter and had a career year.

Correction: when healthy he WAS dominant. But he lost his starting job with Dallas in 2021 and even before the unfortunate injury with Cincy in 2022 he had been anything but dominant. There was a stretch there where he was one of the best right tackles in football... but the last two years we saw him on the field he wasn't close to that. He is only 30. The talk seems to be that the Bills would be willing to try him at guard, maybe that revitalises him somewhat, but if they have signed him to play OT it will not work out well.

Sure, to do it to like NFL team level it takes at least that time in all likelihood double. My rule is nobody goes on my draft board without evaluating AT LEAST three full games of theirs. That takes somewhere between an hour and a half and three hours per play depending on whether one of the cutup databases has done some of the work for you by cutting out the plays they weren't on the field (i.e. when the other side of the ball was out there) or you literally have to scroll through an entire game film finding the relevant plays on offense or defense etc. It's why even though I really like the highlight videos and clips I have seen on the Yale tackle this year he won't be on my board. I just don't have enough material to make any kind of educated analysis on him and therefore I won't take a view. I have estimated before that I spend about 300 hours watching draft prospects between 1 Jan and draft night. It works out at about 18 hours a week or thereabouts. It's a geeky hobby I confess but I enjoy it.

And I'm pretty much ready to go I think Virg depending on what @julian does.

Hang on, I was wrong about McKenzie to the tune of about 80 yards. My argument was not "he is a stud" or "the Bills long term answer at slot" my argument on McKenzie in the summer of 2022 was simply he was the best option on the roster to start in 2022 and he would be the starting slot. Both proven correct. And that he would post career high numbers, also correct. And that he would have 500 yards receiving. Not correct, he had 423. So if you want to argue I was 77 yards off on my projection, fine. But on everything else what I said is exactly what happened. As for the tired "Dorsey didn't get Shakir on the field as a rookie" - that's not true. He played 30% of the offensive snaps. Not bad for a 5th round rookie. He inly got 20 targets because he was not getting open and the reason he was not getting open was he didn't run proper routes at Boise, came from a gimmicky scheme and the learning curve to playing in a pro-style offense was significant. To be clear I have never said Khalil Shakir is Cole Beasley mark II. He is a different player than Beas. I said that already. It is like Stefon Diggs and Mike Evans are both outside receivers but are nothing alike in terms of skillset. But the numbers and the tape are pretty clear is significantly less effective when split wide. The route running is still improving and I don't discount the chance it improves further. But the physical limitations that hurt him on the outside are ones he can't change.

#FireBeane

I like Nabers, Bishop and Davis. Don't like much else (though haven't watched Sundell). And did Joe genuinely draft a LS? 😂

Hang on, what I actually said was they had drafted Shakir to be their long term slot but he wouldn't start in 2022 until at best late in the year because he came from a gimmicky offense where he didn't really run proper routes at Boise and as such McKenzie was the best and most likely starting option they had for that year. Which far from being wrong is EXACTLY what happened. And I did say he'd do more than he did before. I think I said 500 yards, he had 400 and odd, so I was I dunno 80 yards or so high on my projection for him. Shakir is a slot only guy. He can take a snaps outside for you, he can get you out of a game there if you need him to, but if you are going to put him out there as one of your primary boundary players for a game it isn't going to go well. He doesn't have the physical skillset or route running ability to do it. And the tape when he did do it last year is very uninspiring. I like Khalil Shakir a lot. But he is a slot receiver.

I'm sorry I disagree on this. The reason he is slot only is because he is the bottom one percentile all time for NFL receivers in terms of arm length. It means he struggles to get off press and it means he struggles when fighting with DBs downfield. He also frankly just doesn't run routes well enough for the outside where you really need to be at your landmarks because your QB rarely has the luxury of throwing to you as a stopped target outside. It has been proven on the field too. His effectiveness drops significantly vs man and when line up outside. He is a slot receiver who you use against zone defenses between the hashes and trust his quick feet and elusiveness to get you yards after the catch. He didn't though.