If you sliced through cyberspace, you would have seen a litany of legitimate sports sites selling a Big Blue bag of goods: the New York Giants have acute interest in a certain player.
On the surface, that makes sense. When you have the fourth overall pick in the NFL Draft you treat it with the secrecy and urgency it deserves. Except all the trusted sites have the G-Men lusting for quarterback Justin Herbert.
No doubt that's part of the pre-draft subterfuge that infects the NFL in the hectic hours before the first round. The Giants are as interested in Herbert as they are in Sammy Baugh. But they want the NFL to think they're on the cusp of drafting a top-flight QB — despite the fact that they just got one last year — to make the No. 4 pick all the more seductive. All it takes is one fool to believe the Giants and they can offer a small fortune of draft stock for their pick.
The Giants aren't benching or dealing Daniel Jones. But they need help almost everywhere else. So the Giants have four options, some of which will be dictated by the teams ahead of them. First, they can get absurdly lucky and have Chase Young tumble onto their laps. Second, they will draft the best linebacker on the board, Clemson's Isaiah Simmons. Third, they will draft from the gaggle of Grade A offensive linemen. Or their fourth option is to trade down the draft and still pick a powerful tackle. (For the record, Dave Gettleman has never traded a first-round pick as GM of an NFL club.)
So if a team drools over Herbert or Tua Tagovailoa, and wants to slide in line ahead of the Miami Dolphins with the fifth overall pick, they could give Big Blue some extra picks for the right to the No. 4 slot. The Giants can afford to trot back five or so spots and still bag one of the following beefy studs: Andrew Thomas, Jedrick Willls Jr., Tristan Wirfs, or Mecki Becton. Maybe one will be gone but the draft is so thick with tackles that the Giants can't really miss in the first round.
If you culled through the virtual stacks of scouting sites and mountainous mock drafts, you will find varying grades on the top linemen. But the aforementioned four all have franchise player signs on them. Becton, at 6-foot-7, 360 pounds, with oddly nimble feet, may have the highest ceiling. Meanwhile, Wirfs seems to be the most complete and ready to plug-and-play. Georgia's Thomas was considered by many to be the best of the bunch during last season, and yet, NFL.com has Alabama's Wills rated highest among all offensive linemen coming out of college (6.85) and ranked sixth among all players in the draft. The only potential Giants ranked higher than Wills are the top-ranked Young and fifth-ranked Simmons.
If you want to shoehorn a fifth option, and think the Giants might draft Tagovailoa or Herbert, then deal him to a QB-starved club, consider the threadbare nature of the draft. FOX Sports college football guru, Joel Klatt, said that several teams are so scared over the firewalls between scouts, coaches, and execs that they planted IT geeks in the GM's driveway to keep their inner circle connected. Too much can go wrong in a virtual draft for the Giants to risk a draft-and-trade.
But it wasn't a waste to toss out a fishing line and watch NBC, SNY, The New York Post, The New York Daily News, Yahoo.com, NJ.com, and Bleacher Report bite on it at varying PSI. It will ruffle a few NFL feathers, and add a variable to the enemy's dream draft day.
But this is to make sure that you, the Big Blue devotee who suffers these picks with jock-itch discomfort, don't get reeled in by an old-school, Cold-War case of propaganda. The Giants know they probably won't get Young, though they may have to grind their teeth on Simmons if he's available. If not, then the easy play is to pick a hulking lineman or trade the fourth pick and grab the same or similar lineman a few slots later.
The G-Men have the QB they want. Now they must find the right protein-gobbling giant to protect his blind side. Everything else, to quote Don King, is trickeration.
Twitter: @JasonKeidel