After months of rumor and speculation, Thursday night’s first round of the NFL draft featured less chaos than anticipated. There were few eyebrow-scorching picks and, instead, a steady stream of sensible selections.
Let’s look at some of the winners from the opening night.
Seattle Seahawks
Think about this: 12 months ago, John Schneider and Pete Carroll, Seattle’s chief decision-makers, were at a crossroads. They were almost run out of town by a Russell Wilson-led revolt. Instead, they traded the quarterback to the Broncos, receiving a bounty of draft picks in return. Wilson proceeded to set fire to everything in his sight in Denver. Then the pair crushed last year’s draft, selecting six starters from nine picks, including Charles Cross, Abraham Lucas, Tariq Woolen and Kenneth Walker III, all budding stars at their positions. Oh, and there was the small matter of them finding Geno Smith on the quarterback scrap heap and resurrecting his career.
Now this. On Thursday night they were able to land the top cornerback prospect in the class and the top receiving prospect, grabbing Illinois’ Devon Witherspoon with the fifth overall pick and Ohio State’s Jaxon Smith-Njigba at No 20. Witherspoon is a quintessential Carroll corner: He’s quick, feisty, and plays with an aggressiveness bordering on violence. Smith-Njigba will serve as the perfect complement to the DK Metcalf-Tyler Lockett receiving duo.
In the span of a year, Carroll has gone from hearing chatter that he should retire to overhauling the Seahawks roster. What looked like a long rebuild in the wake of the Wilson trade now looks like one of the most talented, youthful rosters in the craptastic NFC.
Questions about whether Smith is a viable long-term option at quarterback will linger. But the rest of the Seahawks roster is now set up for sustained success.
Houston Texans
Heading into draft night, there were whispers of a split in the Texans’ camp. Did the owner want to select a quarterback? What about DeMeco Ryans, the new head coach, a defense-first guy? Did he want the top defensive player on the board? What would Nick Caserio, the Texans’ GM and the man stuck in the middle, do?
How about grabbing them both! Caserio deserves credit. He spent two months, and most of the last two weeks, painting himself out to be a doofus. The rumor mill had the Texans down to pass on a quarterback with the second overall pick. Then it had them taking Kentucky’s Will Levis, who the league decided was not worthy of a first-round selection at all. And then it had them opting for Tyree Wilson ahead of Will Anderson, the Alabama star who was the top defensive player according to most analysts.
Wrong. Caserio was targeting a quarterback and Anderson. With the second pick, he selected the franchise’s quarterback of the future: Ohio State’s CJ Stroud. Of all the quarterback prospects, Stroud was the cleanest. He doesn’t quite have the pizzazz of Bryce Young, Anthony Richardson, or even Levis (though it’s there in spurts), but he does all of the stuff that really matters, that adds up to consistency, efficiency and wins at the highest level.
Houston weren’t done there. They dealt the 12th pick in the draft and a first-round pick in next year’s draft with the Cardinals to grab the third choice in the draft, selecting Anderson, the top edge-defender on the majority of draft boards – and a linchpin for the team’s new-look defense.
The Texans’ roster is still a long, long way from being good enough to compete for a division title. But by adding Stroud and Anderson they now have cornerstones on either side of the ball.
Philadelphia Eagles
At what point does Roger Goodell just walk to the podium and announce “‘I am vetoing the Eagles pick. Howie Roseman can’t keep getting away with this”?
So long as Goodell suppresses his inner Jessie Pinkman, Roseman, the Eagles general manager, will continue to lord over the draft process.
I mean, seriously? How? First of all, the Eagles’ made the aggressive move to jump up a spot to grab Georgia defensive lineman Jalen Carter, for the lowly price of a fourth-round pick.
Carter was one of the most biggest questions in the draft. He was the finest lineman on the best defense in football for two straight years. On Georgia’s historic 2021 unit – four of whom now play for the Eagles! – he was the standout player. Had he entered the draft last season, he would have been a favorite to go first overall.
Off-the-field issues and questions about his football character gave some teams reservations. On the field, there were no questions. He is, in essence, Thanos on a football field: Too big, too quick, too strong for any player to contain him.
Roseman took a gamble on the upside. The Eagles have one of the two most talented rosters in the NFC. With Jalen Hurts locked in a long-term deal at quarterback, they expect to contend for titles for the next season five years, at least. They won’t be drafting anywhere near the Top 10 again in the near future barring, an injury to their star quarterback. Roseman used the rare opportunity to grab a blue-chip prospect at the top of the draft, who just so happens to line up at the team’s biggest position of need and may be the most gifted player in the entire class.
And that wasn’t all. Nolan Smith, Carter’s teammate at Georgia, slipped all the way from a top-10 projection to the Eagles’ second first-round selection with the 30th. It was the steal of the night, and will add another weapon to the Eagles’ formidable defensive line. Smith is the most explosive get-off-and-go pass-rusher in the class, who is a little shorter and a hair lighter than the NFL prototype.
This offseason, the NFL’s leader in pressures and sacks a year ago lost one stud (Javon Hargrave) along their defensive line and gained two potential stars. Good luck, everyone else.
Running backs
Call it a comeback. The Falcons selected Texas running back Bijan Robinson with the eighth overall pick before the Lions offered the shocker of the night, tabbing Alabama’s Jahmyr Gibbs at No 12. Robinson, at least, was expected to go in the Top 10. But Gibbs was considered by many to be a fringe first-rounder who could sneak into the 20s.
It’s the first time a running back has been drafted in the Top 20 since Saquon Barkley in 2018. And on Thursday two! And they both went before any receiver.
Will the football nerds ever recover? The notion that running backs don’t matter has become a staple of the data-driven movement within the NFL. It has some validity. In certain schemes, the running back is the most interchangeable position on the field – but only in those particular schemes. And the position does carry an outsized injury risk, which always makes a first-round investment risky.
The modern history of selecting first-round running backs has been iffy. Often, teams wind up with good players, but get forced into either letting them walk or offering contracts that become an burden on their salary cap.
Neither Robinson nor Gibbs are pure runners, though. They’re matchup pieces, offensive weapons who can flex across the formation and make an impact in the passing game as receivers.
The NFL is a matchup league. Plenty of oxygen is spent on Xs and Os, but most teams in the NFL run the same stuff. It’s about having pieces that can create matchup chaos or who have the individual skills to separate one-on-one. The league has been really creative with how its uses fungible players who can move from the backfield to a receiver spot, whether that’s a running back pushing out or a receiver like Deebo Samuel moving into the backfield.
Old-school, downhill, thumping running backs may not matter. They may be interchangeable. But talented, near-positionless offensive pieces are not.
Buffalo Bills
Adding tight end Dalton Kincaid feels a little like putting a hat on a hat for the Bills. They already have Dawson Knox, a receiver-first tight end with a good two-man rapport with quarterback Josh Allen.
The Bills didn’t need Kincaid. But his selection feels like a signifier of something broader. It’s clear the Bills have hit on an idea: If they can’t slow and stop the Chiefs (or Bengals) offense in January, they’re going to have to outscore them.
It’s never a bad idea to add more pieces around Allen. By the end of last season, the Bills’ offense looked stale. It relied too much on Allen and heroball. They’ll have time over the next two days to add extra pieces on the offensive line and defense, a necessity heading into next season. But grabbing an athletic matchup piece who can function, ostensibly, as a big receiver over the middle of the field will bring fresh ideas to an offense that’s in need of some.
