Here’s one lingering item from the first round of the 2017 draft that has come up from time to time this week on PFT Live, but that I’ve yet to share with the PFT audience specifically: The Arizona Cardinals either snookered the Chiefs and Texans -- or the Cardinals shot themselves in the foot.
Arizona earned the 13th overall pick, and then Arizona began to make all too obvious its interest in finding a successor to quarterback Carson Palmer. Unless it really wasn’t interested in doing that at all.
There’s no middle ground here. Either the Cardinals, convinced they’d have multiple viable quarterback options available at No. 13, made their interest in drafting someone Palmer willingly would groom too obvious, or the Cardinals successfully planted a false flag in the ground and duped both the Chiefs and Texans to give up future first-round picks in order to leapfrog Arizona.
It’s possible the Cardinals simply miscalculated, assuming based on the rampant pooh-poohing of the 2017 quarterback class early in the pre-draft process that Mitchell Trubisky and/or Patrick Mahomes and/or Deshaun Watson would be available. Through nine picks, two of them were.
Then came pick No. 10, and there went Mahomes. Next came pick No. 12, and farewell went Watson.
It’s also possible that the Cardinals calculated perfectly, puffing the smokescreen until both the Chiefs and Texans believed they had to get above No. 13, necessarily pushing talented non-quarterbacks into Arizona’s lap and ultimately allowing the Cardinals to snare Temple linebacker Haason Reddick.
So it was genius to muse so openly about picking a quarterback, or it was idiocy. Either way, the Cardinals got Reddick, but they still don’t have an in-house successor who can be groomed in 2017 by Palmer, if 2017 ends up being his last year. The real question is whether they decided they wanted to land one in this year’s crop.
If they didn’t, they played the situation perfectly.