Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. I'm Robert Mays. Today we're talking about the peculiarities of the 2026 NFL draft. The overall quality of this class, I think, is up for debate. We have that debate to an extent at the top of this show with me, Derek Classen and Dave Hellman. But I think there are a couple more layers to this discussion. We talked about one of those today. At the top of this draft,

even if there are players that we like and players that we like that extend into the back

half of the first round and the second round into the third round, it really does feel like on

multiple levels we're going to be forced to make compromises or teams are going to be forced to make

compromises in this draft on certain outlier prospects that they might not have to in a

typical year. Some of that is positional. We'll talk about that a lot over the next month or so

with running backs off-ball linebacker safety is all going potentially in the top 10. But some of it is

also about physical profile, about athleticism testing, about production.

So that's what we spend some time on today, talking about the guys who are top half of the first round picks, but maybe have historically short arms, are small compared to other

receiver prospects, are slow compared to other receiver prospects that have gone on this range.

And we tried to ask a question about all these guys and project the question I think a lot of teams has to have to ask in these situations. Why are you compromising on this player? And is he worth compromising for? It's a discussion I think we're going to revisit a lot as we get a little bit deeper into this draft process. And it is the one that

me, Derek Classen, and Dave Hellman had a few different times today. So let's get to it.

So Dave, as we dig in today's topic, I want to ask you a question as somebody who is coming a little bit later to the draft process and just see how you process this.

Okay.

This idea of us maybe twisting ourselves in a knots a little bit to talk about this draft where it's like, well, you know, there aren't that many superstar players.

There's a lot of starting caliber players and this and that. Are we just rationalizing the fact that this is a really bad draft? And are we trying to talk about it in a way that keeps ourselves interested? But in reality, it's just a really bad draft. This isn't totally rooted in the conversation we're about to have, but I wanted to ask you this right off the bat as we kind of weighed into our draft process. You know what? We didn't plan this out,

but this was the last thing I was looking at before we started recording, and I'm glad we're

starting here. Of course, you're not guaranteed to find the best players at the top of the draft.

There are some first rounds that are worse than others.

I'm a firm believer. There's no such thing as a bad draft. There are good players. I totally disagree with that. No, I disagree. What is your, how do you, what does that mean? It means that there are great players in any given draft for you to go fine. Three if there's three or four great players in a draft of 250 players, that is still an objectively

bad draft.

Not every draft is going to be 2011, right?

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