(05-02-2023, 08:45 AM)NYC4jags Wrote:

(05-01-2023, 06:58 PM)rpr52121 Wrote: Everyone keeps harping on the "not trading back up" as a huge Baalke failure, and bring up the teams that traded up.

This completely forgets that the teams trading down have to believe they can still get they guy(s) they are targeting by trading back to the Jags pick. That just may NOT have been case. Plus in a draft where some of those teams didn't value the late round picks, it may not have happened without blowing them away with a 2024 pick overpay.

For example, the Jags had options to trade back even further from #27 but did not take them because they knew or thought Harrison would no longer be there after #28. 

There is basically nothing Baalke could have done to fix that. Unless he was supposed to 2-3 trades in a row ahead of time to keep moving up, but that is nearly impossible to do because of the same issue where teams don't want to trade their pick 10-15 picks prior to being on the clock because they don't know if their guys will be there or not.

Getting stuck with that many late picks is a failure any way you want to slice it. It wasn't their intent. 

Yes, it is absolutely the result of circumstance more than it is GM execution, but they rolled the dice gaining all those picks with the intent of packaging them to move up. 

Then they got stuck with them.

 A high number of long shots to make the roster will likely help our depth improve a little bit, and maybe we even unearth a starter or rotational guy, but the reality is we've got 6-8 players freshly added that are gonna get cut on August 29th or sooner. 

The strategy was swing and a miss. I don't hate them for swinging on the pitch, but they didn't connect. 
Pardon the drawn out baseball analogy, but all we can do is hope that a few of these long shot additions can bunt us around the bases at this point. 

Doesn't mean this is going to turn out to be a bad Jags draft class. Could end up a great one when we look back on it in 2025.

If they got the same guy at #27 that they were going to draft at #24, and gained picks in the process, how is that a failure?  Or even if they had 4 guys they rated about the same, and got one of them at pick #27, how is that a failure?  Isn't it possible that trading down wasn't so much a "strategy" as it was an opportunity?  Free picks.  

We judge the draft like we're all-seeing, all-knowing gods of the draft.  When in reality, we don't have any clue about who these players are, or what went into these decisions.   Then we act like we're the smartest guy in the room, and would have done so much better than Trent Baalke did, but guess what?  I'm the smartest guy in the room, because I know that I don't know [BLEEP] about the draft or the players in it, compared to an NFL GM.

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