GIANTS TAKE BITE OF APPLE
Draft turns sour but Blue says pick is still sweet
Eli Apple, the Ohio Statetate cornerback with the questionable e culinary skills, might turn out to be a terrific player for the Giants. He certainly rtainly fills a big need. And if nothing else, he’s got the perfect name. But that was about the only nly perfect thing about the way the first nine ne picks of the NFL draft worked out for the Giants on Thursday night.
In fact, it’s hard to imagine e things going much worse.
As the Giants sat there at No. 10 — perfectly content to stay put, according to VP of Player Evaluation Marc Ross — two teams jumped right over them to take their top two targets off the board. The Tennessee Titans moved up from 15 to 8 to take Michigan State tackle Jack Conklin, the Giants’ second choice, according to team sources. And then the Chicago Bears moved from 11 to 9 to take the Giants’ top target, Georgia linebacker Leonard Floyd.
Making matters worse, the player that was squeezed out of the Top 9 and right into the Giants’ lap was Ole Miss offensive tackle Laremy Tunsil, who just a few weeks ago was thought to be the No. 1 player in this draft. But that was before an odd video was posted to his hacked Twitter account moments before the draft began, showing him taking a bong hit while wearing a gas mask.
That took him right off the Giants’ draft board, according to a team source, and left them scrambling when it was their turn to make a pick.
“Every year during the draft something funny happens,” Giants GM Jerry Reese said. “It’s no different this year.”
Well, it was a little different and nobody in the Giants’ war room was laughing. It’s not that they don’t l i ke Apple, t he 6 -1, 199-pounder out of Voorhees, N.J. They had him rated ahead of Florida’s Vernon Hargreaves (who went one pick later to Tampa Bay) and Ross said he’s a corner who “can lock people down and they don’t even throw his way.” And certainly the Giants need a player like him. They did just sign cornerback Janoris Jenkins to a five-year, $62.5 million deal and they do still have Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie. But DRC, with an $8.5 million salary cap number in 2017, could be a cap casualty at the end of the year. And really, in this pass-happy era, the best teams don’t just have two top corners. As Reese said, “When you have two corners in this league, you’re short one.
“You’ve got to have three quality corners to really get out there and function at a high level, I think,” Reese said. “We think we can play with anybody y around the league with these three guys.”
Fair enough. And maybe he’s right. But t the Giants sure did seem like they were caught unprepared in the middle of their nightmare draft scenario. If they didn’t see the Titans trading up for Conklin or the Bears trading up for Floyd, they were the only ones who missed the signals. And if those were their top two cho choices — and a source insists they were — they should’ve been more proactive in see seeking to trade up themselves.
They also sh should’ve been ready to trade down — where t they possibly could’ve gotten Apple lower in the first — once their draft plans went awry.
Reese did say the Giants had one offer to trade down, but “we didn’t like it.” But really, though they all insisted that they had played out this possible scenario, it didn didn’t sound like the Giants were prepared with trade-downtr possibilities at all.
And as for a t trade up, Reese said, “There’s always a possibi possibility to trade up if you want to
pay the price to trade up. Absolutely the price was too high.”
The Titans did pay a high price to jump from 15 to 8, sending their third-round pick and a 2017 second-rounder to the Browns. But the Bears’ price to move up from 11 to 9 was much lower — a fourth-round pick (though since the Bears were picking three spots higher in the fourth round, the price for the Giants likely would’ve been higher).
That left the Giants, in a very important draft with a GM on a hot seat, in the uncomfortable position of hoping they were able to make the best of a bad hand. And maybe they did. Because in the months before the draft only one real negative came out about Apple — a quote from an unnamed scout to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, who said Apple has “off-the-field issues” and “no life skills.” Specifically, the scout said, he “can’t cook.”
Ross, appropriately, called that criticism “ridiculous” — because it is. The Giants seemed to genuinely like everything about Apple. No, he wasn’t the player they were hoping to pick, or even their Plan B or Plan C. But they swore they weren’t disappointed at all. “No, you don’t get disappointed up here,” Reese said. “You just stay with your board and when they come off, they come off. Nobody’s crying in there when somebody gets picked. You know, ‘OK, who’s the next best guy available?’ “We think we got a really good player.” And even though it wasn’t the player they were expecting, they still may turn out to be right.