2023 NFL Draft

[clyde21]

Oh look, Pats took a kicker in the 4th. Maybe we knew something

what did we know

[arich35]

Oh look, Pats took a kicker in the 4th. Maybe we knew something

what did we know

Moody wouldn't have made it to our 5th round pick

[clyde21]

Oh look, Pats took a kicker in the 4th. Maybe we knew something

what did we know

Moody wouldn't have made it to our 5th round pick

and? so what?

[TheMonarch]

No offense linemen drafted. Double dipped at LB, and at TE.
I'll predict that next year the 9ers will draft at least 2 O-linemen.

[Samurai]

No offense linemen drafted. Double dipped at LB, and at TE.
I'll predict that next year the 9ers will draft at least 2 O-linemen.

I thought they would draft an OT but not exactly shocked they didn't. Shanahan and staff (mainly Chris Foerster) know who they have better than I do and if they were convinced none of the OT's available when we picked (most starting rookie tackles seem to be taken in the first or second rounds) could beat out McKivitz or Moore, then it would be a waste of a draft pick. They are likely sold on Pryor as their experienced, multi-position insurance policy. I have to believe that Foerster has seen enough in McKivitz and/or Moore that they can be a viable starter with a full off-season and training camp. And while PFF is not the be-all, end-all tool, McKivitz had a PFF grade of 69.4 last year, not too far off McGlinchey's 71.5. So it isn't completely unrealistic to expect McKivitz to be a reasonable facsimile of McGlinchey.

The double-dipping at TE is interesting since I think they went after two different targets. I suspect they are hoping Latu can compete with Dwelley and Woerner as a legit TE2 to fill-in for Kittle. Obviously Latu isn't Kittle (who is? very easy for us to get spoiled when you have Kittle as your TE1) but he seems to fit with the things you want from a TE2. Willis is different; he is not a traditional TE. He is a versatile Swiss-army knife and with his athleticism and ability to line up as an H-back, in the slot, or as an in-line TE makes me think that he could be groomed to be Juice's eventual replacement as our versatile fullback. Juice carries a big salary and isn't getting any younger so seeing if we could develop a rookie to eventually take that role makes sense to me.

Also interested to see how they plan to use Dee Winters. While he is small for an inside LB, his 40 time makes him much faster than any of our safeties and very close to the times posted by Mooney Ward and Lenoir. An inside LB that can run like a CB is a very rare combination!

Still don't like taking a kicker in the 3rd round but overall not depressed about our picks.

[Bingo_AlphaMan]

Eli Ricks went undrafted. We should try to sign him immediately.

[Bingo_AlphaMan]

Read on Twitter

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[Bingo_AlphaMan]

Read on Twitter

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[Bingo_AlphaMan]

This kid was a fringe 5 star recruit coming out of high school. He committed to my favorite college football team (FSU) and suffered a devastating knee injury. He was never that explosive runner after that. As talented as he still is now, he remains a big what if:

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[arich35]

Pumped we picked up Winters. That semi final game he was all over the field

[Bingo_AlphaMan]

This kid was a fringe 5 star recruit coming out of high school. He committed to my favorite college football team (FSU) and suffered a devastating knee injury. He was never that explosive runner after that. As talented as he still is now, he remains a big what if:

Read on Twitter

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Watch on YouTube

[Bingo_AlphaMan]

Watch on YouTube

[Samurai]

Some of these undrafted guys seem pretty intriguing. Jack Colletto is a true Swiss Army knife that could be used in a similar manner to Taysom Hill. He started his college career as a QB and played LB, fullback, RB, and TE. He could be useful if Juice got hurt, if we had injuries at LB, or even used as a goal-line wildcat QB. And obviously someone that versatile could be very helpful on special teams.

Joely Fisher was exclusively a RT at Stanford but if sticks with the Niners he may be moved inside. His allure is his combination of size, strength and speed. He's 6-4, 296 pounds, bench pressed 225 40 times, and ran the 40 in 4.97. Niners have always been intrigued by guys who are physical anomalies that can be molded into the Niners system. Can't hurt to have enough good offensive linemen!

[CrimsonCrew]

Okay, now that they've made all their picks and we've had some time to decompress, here are my thoughts on the draft, including thoughts on specific players, to the extent that I have them at this point.

Overall, the word that I think best captures this draft is complacency. It's clear from this draft that Lynch and Shanahan felt that, but for Purdy's injury, they would have won the SB this past year. And hey, maybe they would have, but it's a lot to assume that. The Eagles are a damn good team, on paper and on the field, and they absolutely crushed this draft. There is absolutely no doubt that the 2023 Eagles are better today than they were a week ago. I'm not sure you can say the same thing about the 49ers. The AFC is also full of teams that could rival the 49ers. Thankfully we wouldn't see any of them until the Super Bowl.

Now, we were picking late in the third round. The Eagles had made four selections by then, so we can't hold them to the same standard. But we needed to nail those three picks in the late third, and we just didn't. As I said before the draft, this draft and those picks in particular, was important not so much for 2023, but for 2024 and the years ahead. We have traded so many valuable picks that we absolutely have to find talent later in the draft. We have a couple more years of cheap QBs, but that won't last much longer. There's some argument to go for lower-value positions with those picks. You tend to see less risky players fall at lower value positions, so you trade upside for greater certainty. On this roster, maybe there's something to be said for that. But that's not what they did, IMO, other than the Brown pick. They also went for character and leadership repeatedly, which I like, but a few of their picks may simply lack the requisite athleticism to excel in the league.

87) S Ji'Ayir Brown - As a general rule, I don't like trading up at all, and even less so for a safety. That said, this was a relatively weak safety class, and Brown was basically the last of the guys I was comfortable with as a potential starter. Really the only knock on Brown is his lack of speed, though it is a legitimate concern. If he ran 0.1 or 0.15 seconds faster, we might be talking about a high second-rounder. Brown seems to bring a lot to the table in terms of ability and desire. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that he's a gold helmet guy. Leader in the locker room, really hard worker, playmaker, etc. I liked this pick at the time, and still like it. He could be our FS for the foreseeable future.

99) K Jake Moody - Pretty easily the worst pick in the draft, and anyone who disagrees with that is just fooling themselves. Nothing at all against the kid or the player. It's basically impossible to justify taking a K in the third round of the draft, and all the more so when you take that guy with your second selection. Look earlier in this thread for more rants, but the reality is that rookie kickers usually aren't all that good, and you can get guys to play at the same level on the cheap. There were tons of good players still on the board at positions of need. Any of the five guys who went after our back-to-back picks would have been much better picks. I was eyeing Blake Freeland, but only because I never expected Dawand Jones to still be available (didn't even look at Jones as I figured he'd be gone, and it's possible he's a terrible scheme fit at his size). We could have had either. I for one do not have our FO's faith in the OT position, and even if I did for next year, we need to start grooming a replacement for Trent. I don't think that player is on our roster right now. There were also loads of talented CBs, several intriguing WRs, and some talented DEs. Going kicker was inexcusable in my book.

100) TE Cameron Latu - The only reason I haven't been more vocal about this pick is because of the Moody pick. But I hate this one. I had Latu as a condolence prize in the fifth or sixth if we missed on the good TEs in the third (Luke Schoonmaker was the guy I thought might be there, though he wasn't). Taking him in the third - even with TEs in general going markedly higher than projected - is crazy. I don't understand the pick at all. Latu is undersized. He's not a good blocker. He's not a good athlete. He seems to catch the ball fine, but that's about it. He's fairly new to the position, so maybe there is some upside there, but normally you would wait on an upside pick, and you'd grab a guy with a strong athletic profile. That's not Latu. I quickly watched a couple of his games, and he just doesn't do anything all that well. His routes look lazy - though maybe just because he's slow. He's passable as an in-line run blocker, but mostly by just getting in the way, and he sucks in space, missing blocks constantly. I can't tell you how many times his dude made the tackle on an outside run play. As with Moody, there were just so many other talented guys on the board at this point at more important positions. I wouldn't be all that surprised if Willis ends up being the better pro.

155) CB Darrell Luter - I am cautiously optimistic about this pick. As I've said before, CB is tough for me, especially this year as I'm not entirely certain what we'll be running. Scheme is so important to the success of these guys. But Luter is an intriguing guy. Decent size with a long frame, pretty good speed and explosiveness, though oddly his short shuttle is garbage (third percentile, and not a fluke; he ran it again at his pro day and only improved by 0.05 seconds). He's got experience, has made some plays on the ball. I think he has a chance to take Ambry Thomas' roster spot.

173) DE Robert Beal - Beal is an interesting one. This draft had loads of undersized, really explosive edge rushers. This is the guy we got. There were others I liked more, but many of them went well before this. I think I'd rather take a shot on Beal in the fifth than, say, Byron Young in the third (and he was gone well before we picked anyway). Beal wasn't super productive, but he played on a very deep defense and spent some time dropping into coverage. With his length and explosiveness, playing under Kocurek, I think he could be the sort of player who turns out to be a better pro than college player. He's got a frame that could carry more weight than a lot of the other speed guys, at almost 6'4" with nearly 35" arms with pretty big hands. A lot of the smaller speed guys come in around 6'2" with shorter arms. As a dedicated speed rusher, I think he could find a role on this team. That said, I don't think he's going to bend the edge all that well (didn't do the agility drills at the combine; at his pro day, was around the 40th percentile in both), and his vertical was oddly awful (16th percentile; usually vertical and 40 times have some correlation). Still, at this point, at this position, he's worth taking a chance on.

216) LB Dee Winters - Winters is a pretty interesting pick. Somewhat like Brown, you can argue that he had one thing that pushed him way down draft boards, and that's his size. He's really small, even by today's LB standards. But we've done pretty well with smaller LBs lately. He's almost the exact same size as Nakobe Dean, who will likely be starting for the Eagles this year, and weighs about the same as Al-Shaair did at his pro day (though he was nine pounds heavier at the combine). He has some limitations due to his size, but I think he has a legit chance to challenge to start at SLB with his range, instincts, and competitiveness. He took over games at times. Outside of Brown, I think he has the best chance of settling into a starting role early among guys in this draft. Should start out as a STs stalwart. Great value in the 6th.

247) TE Brayden Willis - Willis is actually pretty similar to Latu. Undersized, pretty raw, but with some upside. He's similarly limited athletically. He profiles as the more active blocker, and has versatility to back up multiple spots and maybe take over for Juszczyk at some point. At this point in the draft, I like this pick.

253 WR Ronnie Bell - No strong feelings about this one. Bell seems like a fine all-around WR who might be able to earn a roster spot with his work on STs. I don't see his truly excelling in any single area, but he seems like a solid, all-around player. I was hoping to come out of this draft with a WR with special quickness. One thing to note with Bell: he improved his agility drills dramatically between the combine and pro day. I'm always skeptical of pro day timing, but he dropped his short shuttle from a solid 4.15 (71%) to 4.05, and his three-cone from a pedestrian 6.98 (47%) to a very good 6.62. I don't know that he played with that sort of quickness, but hopefully he has it in his game somewhere. With one of the last picks in the 7th, you're really just hoping he can make the squad and find some way to contribute.

255) LB Jalen Graham - Gotta be honest, I have basically no feelings about this one. I'm a little surprised we doubled up at LB, but I don't know much of anything about Graham. As said, tough to complain about these late picks really at all.

This was a frustrating draft. Other than two picks, I generally like what the team did. But those two picks are huge. They could have added two more potential starters at premium positions, and instead they took a specialist and a

I suppose the silver lining of this draft is that it gives the strong impression that they have tremendous confidence in some of the unproven players on the team. I wish I shared their confidence, but they've got a much better basis for judgment, and their jobs are (kind of, anyway) hinging on their opinions. They clearly believe in McKivitz, and seemingly in Moore, too. They must have real faith in Drake Jackson to basically be a starting DE, and in Gray to be an effective WR going forward. If not, I just can't see passing on those positions early in the draft.

[CrimsonCrew]

Oh, also a really curious draft in terms of the ages of our picks.

Brown is 23. Moody is 23. Latu is 23. Luter is 23. Beal is 23. Willis is 23. Bell is 23. Only the two LBs are younger, and they're both 22.

Though the most talented players tend to come out as juniors and get drafted in the first couple rounds, I guess.

[CrimsonCrew]

To follow up on Latu, although there was a run on TEs early, the Latu pick signaled the end of it. No TEs were taken in the fourth round, and only one, Cincinnati's Josh Whyle, was taken before the Niners' next pick at 155 (he went at 147). Three TEs went from 162 to 175, two of them before our second fifth-round pick at 173, in Will Mallory (162), Payne Durham (171), and Davis Allen (175). We could have taken the CB at 101 and likely added Latu at 155, and if not, had our pick of one of those three.

The Latu pick is textbook Shanahan and Lynch reaching for a guy when we could have added a comparable player two rounds later.

[thesack12]

You can say a lot of things about this front office, but complacent is not valid at all IMO.

Complacency doesn't = making a bold, super risky, very expensive trade up to draft the most inexperienced 1st round QB in history

Complacency doesn't = trading a pile of picks for arguably the most impactful (Non QB) offensive player in the league yet he's very injury prone

Complacency doesn't = While short on cap, throwing a huge bag at a 30 year old, so you can pluck an important piece away from the team that just beat you.

If anything, I'd say this front office is hungry and has a penchant for gambling.

Trying to compare what the Eagles brought in the draft, versus what the 9ers did is a pointless exercise. Philly had 4 picks in top 66 (including #9, and another 1st.) Whereas, the 9ers weren't even scheduled to go on the clock until #99. Of course, Philly brought in more talent, and conceivably got better much moreso than the 9ers did. I'm not sure, why this is even a point of discussion. Its essentially an impossible metric for the 9ers to come out ahead in.

I don't know, I guess I just went in to the draft with an entirely different mindset than some folks. 9ers weren't going to be in position to bring in impact talent, so I was operating under the mindset that bringing in a couple of guys that could even contribute next year was going to be a win. This is still a very talented roster, so it was always going to be a bit difficult for any of these draft picks to come in and make hay early on.

Touching specifically on the Moody pick, again my mindset was being content with getting guys that are going to be able to contribute. Well, Moody projects to be a day 1 starter. Take position out of it for a second, before the draft if someone told you that the 9ers were going to come away with a day 1 starter with one of the compensatory 3rds, would you have been mad? My guess, is people would have been stoked about that. I get positional value, and I'm not trying to discount it. As I mentioned in one of my posts prior to the draft, I said I think they will go kicker but much prefer it be with one of the 7ths. Still, some in 9er nation are acting like this is Janikowski in the 1st all over again, or even a reprint of Aguayo in the 2nd. While it is rare to take a kicker in the first 100 picks, its far from unprecedented.

Now to reflect on 3rd round picks as a whole, and see what else might have been available. Of course every draft is different, but we have a fairly substantial sample size to evaluate here. This regime has made 10 3rd round selections: CJ Beathard, Ahkello Witherspoon, Tarvarius Moore, Fred Warner, Jalen Hurd, Ambry Thomas, Trey Sermon, Danny Gray, Ty Davis Price, and Moody. Save for Warner, what a giant list of turds that is. Warner was a homerun pick, but all those others are nothing burgers. Judging by the past 3rd round history, hell just being able to consistently contribute will be a win for Moody. I get that is not a high bar, but again it kind of speaks to the crap shoot nature of the draft, especially as you get outside the premium picks.

It just goes to show that in my opinion some people were just expecting to much from this draft. If Moody kicks a playoff game winner next year, are people really going to care that he was drafted in the 3rd round?...

As I alluded to in a pre-draft post, with the shortage of picks this year I did basically no research for this draft. So I can't elaborate much on any of the specific prospects. Overall, I'm disappointed they didn't take at least 1 offensive lineman. Still, as I reflected on earlier its going to be hard for any of these guys to make the team and actually contribute, so maybe they felt that in those later rounds nobody was worth taking because they probably wouldn't make the team. There is no sense in drafting a position just because you appear thin there. Maybe they had some of these UDFA's on a similar tier, or perhaps feel they can still get better options on the free agent market.

Also, as for the O-line specifically, considering we were all worried about Brendel and Banks going into last season. Yet they showed faith in those guys and didn't make any short sighted moves to plug into the line. Turns out they were right, both those guys had really solid seasons. So to that point, they have currently have earned the benefit of the doubt in relation to the O-line. At least they have from me anyways.

Shrug, I don't have any strong feelings about this draft one way or the other. And again I wasn't expecting much and went into basically blind, so I'm a leaf blowing in the wind currently. Besides, we won't really have a legitimate feel for the success or fail rate of this draft class until they've been in the league at least 2 seasons.

[Samurai]

Couple of additional thoughts: There were some concerns about Brown because his 4.65 40 time ranked 16th out of 18 safeties - pretty darn slow. But the GPS data showed that he hit a top speed of 21.06 MPH in an actual game. No, he's not making the Olympic relay team, but among his new teammates that's pretty impressive. CMC hit 20.80 MPH on his 68-yard run last season and Deebo's top speed of the season was 20.37 MPH. For a safety, 21.06 is very impressive.

I'm not opposed to either Moody or Latu as players. I just don't like when they were drafted. Niners research indicated that they expected Moody to go in the 4th round; obviously we didn't have a 4th round pick. Sine the Pats took a kicker then, that seems accurate. Since the Niners wanted him and had him as the top kicker in the draft, they felt they had no choice but to use a 3rd round pick. I have to assume that even though the Niners signed Gonzalez, they don't have a high opinion of him since it would be a travesty of a pick if Gonzalez beats out a 3rd round pick in training camp. I'm still scratching my head; maybe Moody will become another Kyle Tucker.

By any of the standard metrics, Latu just looks like a big reach....and that's being polite. But Shanahan said that since he just converted from edge rusher to TE in 2019, he liked how much he developed in such a short time. And that he feels there is still more untapped potential in him. Dunno, still seems like a huge reliance on intangibles particularly since the third round was our first round with picks.

And obviously the team is very high on McKivitz as a starting RT. In fact, Lynch said that the team was open to trading McGlinchey to the Broncos last year, meaning that they were comfortable with McKivitz as a potential starter then. They must see a lot they like in practices that fans haven't seen in his game appearances.

[CrimsonCrew]

You can say a lot of things about this front office, but complacent is not valid at all IMO.

Complacency doesn't = making a bold, super risky, very expensive trade up to draft the most inexperienced 1st round QB in history

Complacency doesn't = trading a pile of picks for arguably the most impactful (Non QB) offensive player in the league yet he's very injury prone

Complacency doesn't = While short on cap, throwing a huge bag at a 30 year old, so you can pluck an important piece away from the team that just beat you.

If anything, I'd say this front office is hungry and has a penchant for gambling.

Trying to compare what the Eagles brought in the draft, versus what the 9ers did is a pointless exercise. Philly had 4 picks in top 66 (including #9, and another 1st.) Whereas, the 9ers weren't even scheduled to go on the clock until #99. Of course, Philly brought in more talent, and conceivably got better much moreso than the 9ers did. I'm not sure, why this is even a point of discussion. Its essentially an impossible metric for the 9ers to come out ahead in.

I don't know, I guess I just went in to the draft with an entirely different mindset than some folks. 9ers weren't going to be in position to bring in impact talent, so I was operating under the mindset that bringing in a couple of guys that could even contribute next year was going to be a win. This is still a very talented roster, so it was always going to be a bit difficult for any of these draft picks to come in and make hay early on.

Touching specifically on the Moody pick, again my mindset was being content with getting guys that are going to be able to contribute. Well, Moody projects to be a day 1 starter. Take position out of it for a second, before the draft if someone told you that the 9ers were going to come away with a day 1 starter with one of the compensatory 3rds, would you have been mad? My guess, is people would have been stoked about that. I get positional value, and I'm not trying to discount it. As I mentioned in one of my posts prior to the draft, I said I think they will go kicker but much prefer it be with one of the 7ths. Still, some in 9er nation are acting like this is Janikowski in the 1st all over again, or even a reprint of Aguayo in the 2nd. While it is rare to take a kicker in the first 100 picks, its far from unprecedented.

Now to reflect on 3rd round picks as a whole, and see what else might have been available. Of course every draft is different, but we have a fairly substantial sample size to evaluate here. This regime has made 10 3rd round selections: CJ Beathard, Ahkello Witherspoon, Tarvarius Moore, Fred Warner, Jalen Hurd, Ambry Thomas, Trey Sermon, Danny Gray, Ty Davis Price, and Moody. Save for Warner, what a giant list of turds that is. Warner was a homerun pick, but all those others are nothing burgers. Judging by the past 3rd round history, hell just being able to consistently contribute will be a win for Moody. I get that is not a high bar, but again it kind of speaks to the crap shoot nature of the draft, especially as you get outside the premium picks.

It just goes to show that in my opinion some people were just expecting to much from this draft. If Moody kicks a playoff game winner next year, are people really going to care that he was drafted in the 3rd round?...

As I alluded to in a pre-draft post, with the shortage of picks this year I did basically no research for this draft. So I can't elaborate much on any of the specific prospects. Overall, I'm disappointed they didn't take at least 1 offensive lineman. Still, as I reflected on earlier its going to be hard for any of these guys to make the team and actually contribute, so maybe they felt that in those later rounds nobody was worth taking because they probably wouldn't make the team. There is no sense in drafting a position just because you appear thin there. Maybe they had some of these UDFA's on a similar tier, or perhaps feel they can still get better options on the free agent market.

Also, as for the O-line specifically, considering we were all worried about Brendel and Banks going into last season. Yet they showed faith in those guys and didn't make any short sighted moves to plug into the line. Turns out they were right, both those guys had really solid seasons. So to that point, they have currently have earned the benefit of the doubt in relation to the O-line. At least they have from me anyways.

Shrug, I don't have any strong feelings about this draft one way or the other. And again I wasn't expecting much and went into basically blind, so I'm a leaf blowing in the wind currently. Besides, we won't really have a legitimate feel for the success or fail rate of this draft class until they've been in the league at least 2 seasons.

As a general proposition, I would agree with you. The FO has shown a great deal of aggressiveness. But their draft approach has been and continues to be pretty dubious. They have been excellent in the late rounds, which has helped to cover up their early round struggles. From an analytics perspective, and those are pretty important in terms of team-building IMO, their approach to the draft in particular has been confounding. Constant trades up, frequent reaches, taking overrated players at low-value positions. Textbook examples of that from the past two years are Davis-Price and Latu, guys who profile as backups, likely available much later in the draft, at positions that simply aren't very valuable. And we've taken those guys with picks that could have netted starters at other positions.

Obviously I did not and do not expect the Niners to have acquired the level of talent in this draft that the Eagles did. As said, the Eagles picked four times before the Niners picked once, and five times within a few picks of the Niners' first three. And the Eagles both lost more and gained less in the FA period. But they're the team we're chasing, and they crushed this draft. We settled for a kicker and a low-upside TE (I hope I'm wrong on the latter, but I don't see where high upside comes from with an undersized, unathletic, unpolished player).

In terms of the kicker, and any pick, it's a question of improvement relative to the average. And rookie kickers don't generally offer that. I'll put this in a separate post, but it is basically unheard of for a rookie kicker to be in the top-10 in terms of FG%. There's a fair bit of volatility in kicker performance, and a pretty big pool of guys who are consistently between say 82-92%, so it just doens't make a ton of sense to really invest in the position. You want a solid guy, but paying a lot in cap space or draft capital is almost always a mistake. And we just didn't have the capital to spend in the draft this year. We need those 3rd round picks to fill out a top-heavy roster and ideally to groom to replace our expensive, aging stars. Our salary cap situation gets pretty grim in a few years, especially if we have to sign a QB to a new contract. We need to be addressing that situation now, and I don't think we did.

You are right that the team deserves some benefit of the doubt about the OL situation. A lot of people last year were freaking out that we didn't address the center position in the draft (I'll note that I was not, as the top centers were gone before our first pick, and arguably West was the next best guy and we added him as a UDFA, though I was pretty nervous about going into the season with Brendel as the only real option). And the OL held up pretty well.

But as I've said in this thread, we're facing the prospect of replacing two starting tackles, including arguably our best (offensive) player, within the span of two years. We have one guy who I'm a little confident in as a starter in McKivitz. Beyond that? I just can't believe in Moore right now. He was an unmitigated disaster the last time he saw the field, and it's hard to envision that he's suddenly reached starting LT caliber. My view is that we are paper thin at the position. So why not inject some competition into it? We're clearly okay cutting ties with a disappointing third-round pick, so why not see if we can find someone better than Moore? Saldiveri, Jones, Freeland, and Warren went within 20 picks of our picks at the end of the round. Those are some very different prospects with some real strengths and some obvious weaknesses.

This isn't just about OT, though. Use those picks on any position of value. Honestly, the Latu pick is almost worse than the Moody pick. At least Moody was really good, and there's real reason to believe he would have been gone by 155. We can be pretty confident Latu would not have been gone by that pick as only one other TE was taken.

Obviously I'm not giving up on the team, and they should still be really good next year, but if they're struggling two years from now, Trey Lance is gone, and they don't have cap space or young stars, I think we'll be able to trace that directly to the handling of Lance and some really suspect drafting.

[CrimsonCrew]

Let's look at the last few drafted rookie kickers (I'm trying to limit to 5th round and higher, the coveted guys).

Cade York, drafted in the 4th round last year, hit 75% of his kicks. That was one of the worst figures in the league.

Evan McPherson, taken in the 5th round in 2021, hit almost 85%. That's a respectable number, but good for 18th in the league among guys who had more than 20 attempts.

In 2020, Belichick took Justin Rohrwasser in the 5th. If you said, "Who?" you're in good company. He didn't beat out Nick Folk, whom the Pats let walk earlier in the offseason then signed off the street, and has never played in the league. I realize it's blasphemy to Aquestion Belichick, but he really doesn't have a great track record in the draft.

Meanwhile, Tyler Bass went in the 6th round that year (I know I said 5th or higher). He actually played, but hit 82.4% of kicks, which was bottom half in the league.

Matt Gay went in the 5th in 2019 and hit 77.1% of kicks (which, it should be noted, was better than Gould that season).

Austin Seibert also went in the 5th and was pretty good at 86.2%. But that wasn't even top-10 in the league.

In 2018, Daniel Carlson went in the 5th round. He hit 81% of his kicks.

In 2017, Jake Elliott went in the 5th. He hit 83.4%, good for 17th in the league.

Incidentally, Harrison Butker went in the 7th round that year and hit 90.5%, though that was still outside the top-10.

And in 2016, Robert Aguayo went in the second round and flamed out in a year.

Now, maybe Moody is truly special and will buck this trend. And you could make a strong argument that the cap space right now is more important than a low draft pick. But the practical reality is that there's probably some guy jonesing for a tryout and a league minimum contract who could approach the kind of kicking we'd get from Moody. Given how few valuable picks we had this year, I think we needed to look elsewhere. If Moody was there in the 5th (which, honestly, I still personally believe is too high), great. If not, we find another solution.