The effort to preserve the drama of the first night of the draft continues.
Adam Schefter of ESPN, one of the two Disney-owned networks that will be televising the draft, reports that Cardinals quarterback Josh Rosen will be present for the start of the team’s offseason program on Monday. The report comes with the kind of nothing-to-see-here flair regarding a possible Rosen trade, which tends to keep the Cardinals’ plans unknown, and which in turn tends to maximize the interest in the first night of the draft.
Schefter also reports that the Cardinals “still have not engaged in active trade discussions to date on Josh Rosen. Other teams have asked about him, but to date, the Cardinals have not shown a willingness to trade him. To date....”
This contradicts a recent (and in our view highly credible) report from Joel Klatt of FOX, who claimed that the Chargers, Giants, and Patriots have shown interest in Rosen, that one of those teams has offered the Cardinals a second-round pick for Rosen, and that the Cardinals want a first-round pick.
The timing of a potential Josh Rosen trade becomes critical to preserving the inherent intrigue of the first night of the draft. If the Cardinals trade Rosen before the draft begins, the message becomes obvious: They’re taking Kyler Murray. So there’s an incentive for the league to encourage the Cardinals not only to keep things quiet, but also to throw water on the idea that a Rosen trade may happen.
That incentive extends to the networks televising the draft. ESPN and ABC understandably want to blow out the ratings, and that doesn’t happen if Arizona’s plans for the first overall pick become known. If Rosen is either traded or it appears that he will be, Arizona’s plans for the first overall pick necessarily become known.
This leads to an interesting question that was posed while discussing those dynamics on Friday’s PFT Live: Will ESPN take the no-tipping-picks rule to the next level and instruct its army of reporters to refrain from reporting anything that would reveal Arizona’s plans? Will ESPN likewise encourage them to trumpet reports that would keep those plans in the dark for as long as possible?
It’s an interesting twist that’s worth monitoring over the next 20 days, as more and more reports emerge regarding the things that may or may not happen during the first round of the draft.