Report: The Patriots Were Ready to Move Up to Draft Baker Mayfield at No. 2
PFT - Jack Mills, the agent for [Baker] Mayfield, said on Andrew Brandt’s podcast that there was a real chance that the Patriots could have traded with the Giants for the second overall pick, and that the Patriots would have selected Mayfield.
“We had another team which is going to surprise you. Another team had said, ‘You may get a big surprise on draft day, at No. 2, if he’s available.’ And it was the Patriots,” Mills said. “They had 23 and they had 31 and they had two seconds. We thought, ‘That’s gonna be a heck of a move, to get up that high from where they are.’ And of course he wasn’t available so we never knew if that was reality or not.”
First of all, I don’t believe a word of this. Not one letter or punctuation mark. I’m not suggesting Jack Mills is lying per se. Though if he was, in agentspeak lying is otherwise known as “doing what you’re getting paid for.” I’ll take him at his word that someone – either inside or outside the Patriots organization – told him the Pats were interested in moving up to the second pick to take his client. There just can be not one subatomic particle of truth to it.
If had the Time Stone and could bend reality Dr. Strange-style to look at 14 million possible outcomes to the 2018 draft, this scenario would be the single balliest. And craziest. Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t have wanted to see it, just for the sheer Internet-busting audacity of it. A team coming off a Super Bowl and moving all the way up to No. 2 to take the future replacement for their league MVP quarterback would have torn the fabric of spacetime. Like 24 hours isn’t enough time in the day for the competing sports networks to have covered a story that big. They might have had to just declare a state of emergency and canceled the remaining 254 selections so that everyone could go home and recover.
So I admit part of me is disappointed Mayfield went first, just because we’ll never know if this could’ve happened. And it makes sense now that Josh McDaniels met with him personally on the Monday before the draft. Which I just chalked up to the usual due diligence. You learn about the kid. Gain experience for when you’re interviewing quarterbacks in the future. And who knows? Maybe he experiences an Aaron Rodgers-like fall and is within reach. Weirder things have happened.
Though nothing as weird as what this agent was told. More likely, this was all just part of the Patriots smokescreen. Their gamesmanship. Start the whispering that you’re going to jump ahead of the Jets and force them into yet another panic move at the vision of them sucking yet another quarterback’s ass for 20 more years. Because the simple, disappointing reality is that the Patriots flat-out lacked the draft capital to make this happen. If you go by the Draft Value Chart that Bill Belichick went out of his way to legitimize in his predraft press conference, the No. 2 pick is worth 2600 points. The five picks New England had in the top 95 combined only get you to 2226. And the picks after that wouldn’t buy you 12 minutes at a parking meter. So this is one of those moments when the truth sadly gets in the way of what otherwise would be an incredible story.
Then again, Mayfield did go the Browns. So there’s a good chance he’ll end up getting beaten half to death playing for a perennial last place team, they’ll draft yet another franchise QB and he ends up playing for McDaniels in New England on a veteran minimum deal. So it was a smart move to plant that seed today. Goddamned Patriots, always thinking four years ahead.