Here’s my chance to be dead wrong before your first cup of
morning coffee is cool enough to drink.
I think Mike Nolan and the 49ers have a blockbuster draft-day
deal in the works.
Here’s my chance to be dead wrong before your first cup of morning coffee is cool enough to drink.
I think Mike Nolan and the 49ers have a blockbuster draft-day deal in the works. And by roughly 9:15am this morning (psst … the Draft’s on ESPN, the remote’s under the sofa cushion) you’ll know if I’m wrong or right.
So here goes:
The evidence for a draft-day deal in which the Niners trade the No. 1 pick for the No. 3 or lower lies in the fact that the organization is being so frusratingly tight-lipped about what ought to be franchise-wide party time.
Think about it – when you’ve got the No. 1 pick and mean to use it, there’s no earthly reason why you don’t call up your guy and the Jerry Maguire of his choosing, and start hammering out a contract.
If you don’t do that, you’re just begging for a contract holdout and bad blood from the start. And you’ll probably wind up paying out the nose anyway.
LeBron James was in a Cavaliers cap before the lottery ping pong ball stopped bouncing. There’s a reason for that.
No, Alex Smith, Aaron Rodgers and Braylon Edwards aren’t any of them LeBron. But the alternative to the 49ers knowing – six weeks ago, for crying out loud – which one of those players they’d like in a San Francisco uniform is just too scary to contemplate.
Because if they still don’t know, it means either a) the new Niners management team is as incompetent as the old; or b) Dr. York is going all Ebeneezer Scrooge on us again and hamstringing Nolan and Co. from the get-go.
I don’t think Nolan is incompetent. I don’t want to let myself think York is up to his old tricks. So that leaves a last option – that this storied franchise is once again up to some clever draft-day trading down.
It would explain the silence. The Niners and whichever team they’re dealing with may still have some details to iron out. Since any such deal’s going to hinge on San Francisco getting a player (Edwards?) other teams must pass up, the Niners would want those teams surprised and on the spot when the hammer falls.
The less the rest of the NFL knows and the longer it doesn’t know it, the lower the odds some other club will mess everything up and take the Niners’ trade-down target.
I’ll leave it at that. Join me, won’t you, in raising your coffee cup to the newest savior of the 49ers franchise … Braylon Edwards, third pick in the 2005 NFL Draft.
Scratch that name out and fill in “Alex Smith” or “Aaron Rodgers” as appropriate.
