How the New York Giants and Oakland Raiders blew it on draft night
Fans of the Giants and Raiders sat through a tumultuous 2018 season with the promise that, come draft night, all the pain and suffering would pay off with a bunch of new stars and a launchpad to the future.
Woof. The Giants selected Duke quarterback Daniel Jones with the sixth overall pick, passing on any non-Kyler Murray signal-caller and any other potential All-Pro who could fill the crater-sized talent hole in their roster.
A year after passing up on the slightly raw, uber-talented Sam Darnold, the Giants selected the very raw, somewhat talented Jones – making it possible that the Jets are now the smartest football operation in New York.
Jones is a classic traits v production prospect. His performances in 2018 were, to be kind, wobbly. He completed a tick over 60% of his throws, averaged less than seven yards per attempt, threw just 22 touchdowns in 11 games and showed all the scary signs of an early-draft pick flop: arm arrogance, erratic decision making, and perilous pocket awareness.
Detractors point to an ever-growing line of quarterback prospects with outrageous physical gifts who struggled with the most essential part of playing the most important position in sports: throwing the ball to your own guys.
Advocates proclaim his impossibleto-teach traits will win out. Jones has a good arm and is an excellent athlete. He was surrounded by inferior talent, they say. Stick him on a roster with fellow pros and watch him soar.
Jones has more room to grow, the argument goes. Dwayne Haskins – selected 15th overall by Washington – was surrounded by blue-chip, five-star prospects at Ohio State; Jones played with no one. Indeed, Haskins had more NFL prospects on his high schoolteam than Jones did in college.
Yet the numbers are still alarming. Fifty-eight quarterbacks have been selected in the first round of the draft in the past 20 years. Want to know when Jones ranks among them in average yards per attempt? Fifty-fourth. His 6.2 AY/A is equal or better than just Kyle Boller, Patrick Ramsey and Jake Locker. Yikes.
But fear not, Giants fans. General manager David Gettleman is a man with a plan: “We may be the Green Bay model where (Aaron) Rodgers sat for three years,” Gettleman told the NFL Network.
OK, perhaps not. As many suspected, Gettleman is running the Giants with all the bluster and arrogance that eventually doomed his tenure in Carolina.
In one offseason, he’s shipped out Landon Collins, Damien Harrison – the best nose guard in the league – and Odell Beckham, arguably the top receiver in the NFL. He used his acquired assets to draft a quarterback roughly 60 picks too early, select a nose guard and a moveable piece in the secondary. Baffling.
The Giants’ second selection, Clemson defensive lineman Dexter Lawrence, would make sense in most years. They need talent everywhere and Lawrence is a multi-positional defender with rare quickness for his size.
Here’s the issue, though: the Giants just shifted Dalvin Tomlinson, a lineman they selected a year ago in the second round, from the outside to the inside, his best position. He was expected to fill the Harrison-sized void.
Adding Lawrence means Tomlinson will be kicked back out outside and become a sunk cost problem playing out of position.
Gettleman tried to rescue things with his third pick, moving back into the first round to grab Georgia cornerback Deandre Baker. Baker is one of the top man-to-man cornerbacks in recent college football history, but his athletic testing results fell below a bunch of the NFL thresholds. He’s no slam dunk.
Out in Oakland, Jon Gruden and Mike Mayock continued their crusade to Make Football Tough Again. Unable to engineer a move to acquire the first overall pick and grab Kyler Murray or subsequently find a dance partner to move down, the Charisma Twins set about acquiring players who could “change the culture”.
Football guys.You know the sort: the lunch pail, blue collar, first-in, last-out kind. All leadership skills and intangible and things that mere mortals couldn’t see on Saturday’s.
They took Clemson defensive end Clelin Ferrell with their first pick. A solid, if unspectacular player, Ferrell was expected to be a top-15 selection. At fourth overall, it felt like a reach, particularly with Houston dynamo Ed Oliver still on the board.
But Mayock and Gruden wanted attitude and fire. With their next two picks, they took a running back and
box safety, much to the chagrin of the analytics community. But how else are you supposed to prove your toughness without running the ball and stopping the run? (Sarcasm intended.)
In fairness to the Raiders, they will leave the draft with two solid players and a potential star, Jacobs. But it’s not what fans were hoping for when they gifted away Khalil Mack in the midst of his Hall of Fame career, or even Amari Cooper, who inspired the Cowboys’ late-season surge.
You still get the impression, however, that the organization has some kind of long-term plan: they’re going to mold the team in Gruden’s image. For better or worse. That probably would have made more sense in the early 2000s than in 2019. But at least there’s some kind of vision.
The Giants appear to be building a team of the hoof. Jones will either be sat behind one of the worst offensive lines in the NFL or be forced to sit and learn behind Eli Manning for three years. I’m not sure which punishment is worse.
No matter what happens, fail or soar, this draft will be forever remembered as the Jones-Gettleman draft. At least when the young quarterback finally does play, he will be able to throw to the best receiver in the football.
Wait, what?