Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said something very important during last week’s NFL owners meetings in Phoenix that you might have missed: “We’re not cocky enough to feel that you’re going to draft way better than anybody else, and it’s very important to create volume,” he said. Smart teams operate by having lots of picks because even the best front-office execs, like Philadelphia’s Howie Roseman, don’t select the best player every time. The backbone of the Patriots’ draft strategy is to trade back as often as possible to accumulate as many chances to pick good players as they can. It was the crux of the Cleveland Browns’ strategy under former VP of football operations Sashi Brown that eventually created, under new general manager John Dorsey, one of the most fun young teams in the league. A literal Nobel Prize–winning economist has done research confirming that this is the best strategy, and yet only a handful of smart teams have caught on.
Lurie’s “volume” strategy plays out in a variety of ways, one of which involves trading down in the draft. Another involves compensatory picks, which are awarded to teams that have lost players to unrestricted free agency. Last week, CBS Sports’s Jason La Canfora identified the Patriots, Eagles, and Ravens as three teams focused on collecting as many compensatory picks as possible. These teams understand they aren’t going to be perfect at projecting talent, but they can still outsmart the competition. Lurie mentioned another aspect that is equally interesting when he said the Eagles should draft a quarterback at least every other year, if not every year. It is worth noting that the Eagles already have a quarterback, Carson Wentz, who they are probably going to pay big money soon when they give him an extension. But the position is so important that developing a new, young quarterback would benefit them greatly, either to keep on their roster or to use as trade bait to improve the team. The Eagles, it should be noted, won Super Bowl LII because they had a second quarterback in Nick Foles. They didn’t get to trade him for a pick, but I think they’ll take what they got.
Now, let’s get to another set of interesting comments. At the NFL combine in February, Steve Keim, the Cardinals general manager and owner of the first overall pick in the draft, said that Josh Rosen was his team’s quarterback “right now, for sure.” It was the latest bit of intrigue in the months-long rumblings about whether Arizona would select Oklahoma quarterback Kyler Murray at no. 1. New Cardinals coach Kliff Kingsbury is a known admirer. Last October, while he was still the head coach at Texas Tech, he said, “I would take him with the first pick of the draft if I could.” It is almost ludicrous to think that Kingsbury is now in a position to do precisely that. When Kingsbury made those remarks, Murray was widely expected to play professional baseball, and Kingsbury was widely expected to be anything other than an NFL head coach. He was fired by Texas Tech in November, then hired as USC’s offensive coordinator in December, and hired by the Cardinals in January. Murray eventually decided to drop baseball and enter the NFL draft. So this possibility even being in play seems ridiculous. It gets even stranger when you consider that the Cardinals selected Rosen 10th overall in last year’s draft. Rumors now swirl that Rosen could be shipped out before the draft.
The Cardinals have one of the most fascinating decisions to make in the history of the draft, one that could prove revolutionary if done correctly. The easiest and most direct route to winning in the NFL is by having a great quarterback, and the best way to acquire one is through the draft. In an analysis of quarterbacks drafted in the first round from 1994 to 2016, Football Outsiders found that 16 of 57 were classified as “good” according to their metric. Only 8.8 percent of quarterbacks selected in the next six rounds received that distinction.
In short, the Cardinals may have accidentally stumbled upon exactly the right strategy: If you don’t have a good quarterback situation, keep picking one until you do. Arizona has taken a few strange turns to get to this position—including a coaching change and a few front office miscues in recent years—but the idea isn’t totally misguided. In 2019, cheap rookie quarterbacks are the most valuable thing in sports, and teams can afford to carry multiple highly drafted passers and spin one off for value.
The problem, however, may be in this specific execution. The Cardinals’ decisions leading up to this pick have been … bad. After trading up to select Rosen with the 10th pick, they surrounded him with one of the worst offensive coaching staffs in recent memory, tanked his value, and then reportedly put him on the trading block. They fired their offensive coordinator, Mike McCoy, one of the least-imaginative play-callers in the league, after Week 7, as well as their defensive-minded head coach, Steve Wilks, after a 3-13 season. Drafting Murray and trading Rosen would not be revolutionary—it’d be an absolute waste of a top-10 pick.
The development of Jared Goff, patron saint of crappy rookie quarterbacks, is fresh in the minds of league decision-makers. Rosen was weighed down by a terrible situation, and if he showed more promise in 2018, he’d be much more sought after. One of the keys to this era of football has been making sure the entire coaching staff is geared toward helping a team’s quarterback—evident in the construction of the Rams, the Eagles, and the Bears. Rosen had the exact opposite setup last year and trading him after that would be a disaster. He can only get better with more playing time under the direction of an offensive play-calling head coach like Kingsbury. With that in mind, the question Arizona should be asking itself is this: Why not have both Murray and Rosen on the roster in 2019? Why not use this season as a great experiment and have both players go through training camp, play during the season, and develop under Kingsbury, who’s allegedly a quarterback guru? Are the Cardinals planning on actually winning in 2019? Didn’t think so. Rosen’s value will skyrocket if he plays well under Kingsbury, so netting what might only be a third-round pick in return for him doesn’t seem worth it. Arizona’s absolute worst-case scenario would be to have two young, cheap quarterbacks with a lot of promise. This is not to say teams should always use first-round picks on quarterbacks. The Cardinals are trying to atone for a few years of bad decision-making, while savvier teams stockpile QBs in later rounds (like the Patriots, who drafted Jimmy Garoppolo in the second round in 2014, despite very much having a starter). But picking a passer with back-to-back first-rounders should not be reflexively dismissed as a bad idea in this case.
The Cardinals could choose another option to create volume in this year’s draft. It is important to note a caveat here: Writing about draft rumors is a bit like chasing ghosts. It’s possible this rumor cycle is fake, and thus it’s foolish to analyze the Cardinals’ options. It’s possible they’re drumming up interest in Murray in the hopes of increasing the value of their pick. So ingrained is lying this time of year that former Cardinals coach Bruce Arians used to say that the best smoke screen during draft season is to tell the truth, since everyone will assume you’re lying. The Murray-to-Arizona rumor is unlike anything I’ve ever heard in my career: It is everywhere. You cannot go 30 seconds in the presence of NFL people without hearing about it. It’s almost suspicious how prevalent it is, which means it might be one of the greatest smoke screens in league history. The best way for the Cardinals to receive a sizable haul for the no. 1 pick is to make the rest of the league think a potential franchise quarterback is available to them only in that spot. Teams love overpaying for quarterbacks. At the Super Bowl, Rams executive vice president of football operations Kevin Demoff told me the team will save about $50 million in cap space over four years by having Goff on a rookie contract. The Cardinals know how valuable the no. 1 pick is.
It’s almost unheard of for a team to pick a quarterback in the first round in back-to-back years. The Cowboys took Troy Aikman no. 1 overall in 1989 and selected Steve Walsh in the supplemental draft, a pick that cost them their first-rounder in 1990. The default operating procedure in the NFL has been to draft a quarterback high and then do everything possible to build an infrastructure around him. In the best-possible scenario, you hit on one who shows signs of brilliance early—like Andrew Luck or Baker Mayfield—and makes the team understand it can start building around him. Rosen didn’t do that in his first season. But throwing a first overall pick at the position the following year while completely giving up on the previous year’s pick is just as silly as standing pat at the position. The Cardinals have a chance to change the way we think about the draft. It is, as Lurie said, important to create volume.