Julian Edelman retires, teams “one draft away” with Lindsay Jones & the Rams’ unique draft strategy with Jourdan Rodrigue
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 13 April 2021
⏱️ 81 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Every offseason, we hear chatter like "they're just one draft away from a Super Bowl," or "All they need to do is hit on defense in the draft." But which teams are REALLY maybe only a draft away from contention? Robert Mays and Lindsay Jones each bring teams to the table, including the Dallas Cowboys, Cleveland Browns, Miami Dolphins and more. Plus they discuss Julian Edelman's Hall of Fame status as he retires during the recording session. Then, Robert welcomes Jourdan Rodrigue, Rams writer for The Athletic to share some insight on the unique approach the Rams are taking when it comes to the draft and player evaluation.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the athletic football show. |
| 0:15.6 | Welcome to the athletic football show. |
| 0:18.1 | I'm Robert Mays. |
| 0:18.9 | Fun show for you guys today. |
| 0:20.4 | Jordan Roderick covers the Rams for us. He's going to be joining us a little bit later to talk about kind of the unique take that the Rams have on their pre-draft process right now. They're handling things in a very different way. They're kind of reconsidering a lot of, I guess, the well-founded principles of how you get ready for the draft as an NFL team. She wrote about it today. It's a great story. Excited to dig into that with her. Before we do that, though, I'm thrilled to welcome my good friend, Lindsay Jones. Lindsay, how are you? I'm great, Robert. How are you doing? I'm doing great. We have about 17 days to the draft. It somehow feels like that's not enough and too many. The draft discourse has already made me very tired, |
| 0:56.0 | but we're going to have to deal with it a little bit more often here over the next |
| 0:59.1 | couple weeks. |
| 1:00.1 | Today, though, I wanted to kind of take a step back from this year's class. |
| 1:04.5 | So last year, when we were going into the draft, |
| 1:07.5 | really right after they had made the move to go get Tom Brady, |
| 1:10.5 | the bucks on paper looked |
| 1:11.9 | like a team that really didn't need that many guys. They had a couple spots that were glaring |
| 1:17.4 | holes. I think right tackle was obviously one of them. I think they needed a playmaker and |
| 1:21.4 | the defensive secondary. And they got both of those things in the first two rounds of the draft. |
| 1:25.8 | And they really finished off their draft with two specific players that put them over the top. And that's a dangerous way |
| 1:31.9 | to approach any draft. For the most part, rookies aren't going to contribute as much as you |
| 1:35.7 | want them to. But every once in a while, there are instances where teams really crush a draft |
| 1:41.8 | and it changes their fortunes, both for that year and for years to come. |
| 1:45.7 | Barnwell and I talked about that 2017 Saints draft on Friday show. I think that's another good |
| 1:50.5 | example. So I wanted to take a step back and look at some teams that typically aren't going to get a |
| 1:56.1 | lot of attention coming up to the draft because they're not either not drafting very high or they're not |
| 2:01.0 | the teams that really control the draft. And that's those teams we think might be one draft away. |
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