Who says they didn't trust their board? Not trusting your board would mean passing on Floyd and picking a lower rated player at that spot. They did not do that. They traded down and picked up additional value. That means they liked the value of the two picks they got back more than Floyd. That's not very hard to understand and has nothing to do with trusting your board. You do realize that every single time every single team has ever traded down for additional picks, they passed on the highest rated player on their board. So what's different about it when Jerry does it?
Let's be careful here. We were picking at #18. If you believe the leaked draft board, we had the following players ranked as 1st-rounders and available to us:
5. Floyd
11. Rhodes
13. Patterson
15. Eifert
17. Werner
It's hard to argue that Floyd wasn't a perfect match to a position of need. By trading down, we passed up on the #5 player on our board (and all other first-rounders on our board) and ended up getting our #22 and #23 players (we were probably assured of getting Frederick, but there was no guarantee we'd get Williams the way we played it, so there's risk too). Going by the old trade value chart (I don't have a better way to value this), that's a 10% loss. And just in general, when your #5 player falls to you at #18 AND fits a need, you take him unless you're completely blown away by a trade offer. And that was not a mind-blowing offer. I can't imagine that they made this move based purely on their board and the values they saw.
I think it was a little bit of panic about all the OL flying off the board and a little bit of Kiffin/Marinelli being new coaches with a new scheme who weren't quite in perfect synch yet with the scouts yet. And so they were a little softer on Floyd than they normally would be on their #5 player, and they were a little desperate, and so a team that has been really good lately about drafting their board bent their rules. And I think they got lucky about how well it worked out. And I also think it will prove to be the exception rather than the rule: we followed our board very closely the rest of the way and I expect we'll be back to that next year.
