Every draft season, being the absolute lunatic that I am, I have a ritual the week before the draft.
I watch the 2014 Kevin Costner instant classic Draft Day.
Draft Day is one of my favorite bad movies of all time. Its plot is nonsense, and most of the movie feels like bad NFL GM cosplay, but man, I love it. I mean, what better farce of the NFL Draft experience could there be than Cleveland Browns GM Sonny Weaver trading three first-round picks with the Seattle Seahawks to move up to No. 1 overall only to select Ohio State linebacker Vontae Mack instead of presumed No. 1-overall prospect QB Bo Callahan, trading back into the first round with the Jacksonville Jaguars one pick ahead of the Seahawks with Callahan still on the board, and then leveraging all of his original compensation back and star punt returner David Putney from the Seahawks so that they can select Bo Callahan. All because none of his teammates went to Callahan’s birthday party.
Shout out to my wife, who actually went to see that movie in theaters with me back in 2014. She still married me five years later, which is somehow even more far-fetched than the plot of this ridiculous film.
If there is a lesson to take away from this ridiculous film, it’s that A) Trades are the most fun part of the NFL Draft, and B) Trades are all about leverage. Fans love to say, just trade up or just trade down, but that’s easier to do in a PFF Draft Sim than in reality. Every trade needs two to tango, and a good trade requires proper leverage to get a surplus value.
There must be another team that wants to trade with you, either up or down, and there needs to be a prospect on the board for whom it is worth making that move. It feels best when that player is one your team isn’t interested in or would be a superfluous roster addition. Still, sometimes it also means leaving a darn good player on the board for someone else, which can come back to bite you (see: Kyle Hamilton).
The general consensus among national and local reporters has been that the Vikings are prime trade-back candidates. With only four picks in this draft and only one in the top 90, it makes sense to slide back and accrue more assets. Especially in a draft with a perceived talent plateau, seemingly without a massive difference between the 12th and 40th prospects. There are all the reasons in the world for GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah to want to strike a deal down, and it would take a player that they were enamored with at pick No. 24 to stand pat.
But where’s the leverage? Who’s moving up, and why would they?
The conventional wisdom is that the most fruitful trade-backs often involve someone moving up for a quarterback. This is a weird QB class, where consensus can’t seem to figure out whether two QBs will be gone before the New York Giants are on the clock at No. 3 or if a guy like Shedeur Sanders could tumble down the board. Also, when does the third quarterback come off the board? If a team like Cleveland passes on quarterback at the top of this draft, could they eye a possible move up to select a sliding Sanders or a player like Jaxson Dart out of Ole Miss?
The Pittsburgh Steelers are a likely quarterback destination, either to catch a falling Sanders or take a swing on a guy like Dart. Unfortunately, the Steelers are picking three spots ahead of the Vikings, killing some of Minnesota’s leverage with a QB-needy team. Still, Adofo-Mensah has shown a willingness to take a trade back offer that’s less than what consensus charts would value, and a team like the Las Vegas Raiders may see Minnesota as a cheaper alternative to get ahead of the second round scrum of QB-needy teams. Trading into the first also secures a fifth-year option, especially value on a young quarterback.
My favorite trade-back scenarios, though, actually involve a completely different position group.
The offensive trenches.
Minnesota sits conveniently one pick ahead of the Houston Texans, a team so desperate for offensive linemen with a pulse that they gave the Vikings a sixth-round pick for Ed Ingram. The Texans feel like a near certainty to take an offensive lineman at pick No. 25. So let’s say you’re a team in a winning window that just lost a Super Bowl because of deficiencies on your offensive line. Would you be interested in getting your pick of that second wave of linemen before Houston does?
Lately, a trendy scenario in mock drafts has been the Kansas City Chiefs moving up with Minnesota to select a player like Ohio State’s Josh Simmons or Texas’ Kelvin Banks Jr. This scenario makes perfect sense. There’s clear leverage in Minnesota’s position. It makes perfect sense for a team like Kansas City to want to aggressively attack that need ahead of Houston, and it would keep Minnesota in the first round.
Frankly, if Adofo-Mensah made this move, it may not be the only trade-back he does. The Vikings at Kansas City’s slot, pick 31, would be in an even better spot for a back of the first-round QB trade for all the same reasons I listed before at a better value for the other team.
The beauty of all these scenarios is that all the work this front office did in free agency makes these moves possible. This team isn’t so desperate for a starter at any one position that they must stick and pick at 24. They can do so if a player slides that they see as a tremendous value at that spot, or they can auction that player off to other teams looking to capitalize on a slide. Kwesi Adofo-Mensah talks a lot about how they’re always running simulations and scenarios, and now they truly can operate open to all those possibilities on draft night.