Washington Football Team: Draft strategy 101 for the 2021 offseason

NFL Draft Golden Rules for the Washington Football Team

1)     Do not squander draft picks. This is pre-eminent. Think of your most prized possessions – your children, your Porsche, your signed Riggo jersey. Draft picks fall into the same category. Protect them at all costs.

This applies even to seemingly value-less seventh-rounders (Can you say “Kam Curl?”). As a practical matter, you should stockpile picks wherever possible.  There may come a time when you do in fact want to deal a couple picks, either to move up in the draft, or perhaps sweeten a trade offer. You want to do this from a position of strength, which means you want to accumulate extra picks to prepare for an eventual trade.

Rule of thumb – there are currently seven rounds in the NFL Draft. You never want to come out of a draft having made fewer than seven picks.

2)     Do not reach for a quarterback in the first round. This the most common draft sin. It happens constantly. My favorite example in recent history came in 2011, when Jake Locker, Blaine Gabbert, and Christian Ponder were all selected in the first twelve picks.

Teams desperate for quarterbacks will go to great lengths to talk themselves into taking a signal caller early. But sometimes there just isn’t a QB worth drafting in the first round. If that is the case, you can’t waste the pick.

Or to put it another way, just because Jake Locker may have been the second best QB in his draft class (and for the record, he wasn’t), that does not mean he was a good QB. It’s hard enough to evaluate quarterbacks, so you’d better be certain that if you are taking one in the first round, every football mind in the room is in agreement that this is our guy.

As a side note, keep the PR staff and team owner occupied with some fun activity while these discussions are going on. Maybe coloring books. Or Lego’s.