An interesting admission from Adam Peters today at the NFL Annual Meeting: The Commanders are ‘far from their answer’ as to what they’re doing with the No. 2 pick, and ‘there’s a lot of information still to get in the next month.’
Grant & Danny played the audio, which includes some questions on No. 2 from our own JP Finlay about making the best decisions, and GP, for one, doesn’t think that’s so far-fetched despite other rumors.
“I made the case last week that they haven't gone to all the pro days, and 70 percent of the meetings that they're gonna end up having with the top quarterbacks are probably not done yet,” Grant said. “I think it's very possible that they have not written it in sharpie; my guess is they're able to put something in pencil or maybe even light pen at this point.”
“I think they can put it in sharpie; it doesn't incentivize them to say that, and I do think they're smart enough to have an open mind,” Danny said. “Like, if they go to dinner with Jayden Daniels and he's rude to the wait staff and throws his food across the table and curses at Lance Newmark and gets up and leaves, they might change their pick. But I think right now, they know who it is; they're too smart and they're too learned and too diligent and have done too much research to have no idea at this point. But again, it doesn't incentivize them to be like, yeah, it's a done deal, because then it makes the next five meetings that they have seem farcical.”
The new regime has had a lot of work to do lately, though, which is why GP can buy it, but Danny is still a little skeptical.
“They had to do their own evals of the roster, which they came to a conclusion that it's not very good, and they went out and spent on a whole bunch of players,” Danny said, “but it's part of the interview process to figure out who's coming here. The access to the tape has been there, and if Adam Peters stayed in San Francisco, they would have been looking at these quarterbacks. So again, I think they know for the most part, and they can have their minds changed, but I think they've got a hierarchy right now, and if they had to do it tomorrow they could.”
“Maybe it's semantics, but I would go as far as saying they have a preference, in the way that anyone does when they start watching,” GP replied. “If you watched all the tape, you'd come away with that liking one guy better, and this is what they do for a living, so it’s that to the one millionth power.”
But, that’s when GP laid out the timeline.
“When they got hired, they had a couple weeks until free agency, so when were they watching all the film on the 20-plus guys they didn't just sign willy-nilly? A lot of those guys did work with the coaches, so they've got some previous experience and maybe didn't have to do as deep a dive on some of those players as you might have, but there was a lot of work that went into that, and that just ended last week, and now you're at the owners meetings,” GP said. “So I'm not sitting here pretending like they have not turned on the film and started studying, of course they have, but I don't think that their mind is made up, or that they have their answer set in stone. My guess is they've got a preference, but there's a lot of meetings where everyone's gonna come together, and the knockdown, drag-out of putting these names in an order on a board, they're not quite there yet – because what is the point of the pro day then, or all of the meetings with these guys, if you've already made up your mind?”
“I think these are just things that you do. This whole stuff is pro-forma, right?” Danny replied. “The idea that a guy in shorts and a T-shirt throwing to his buddies at his own facility is going to change people's minds at this stage? For teams that aren't any good at this, it might, but for pros that I trust as adults, they know who's good.”
Take a listen to the entire debate above!
