The last thing an NFL decision-maker is going to do one week before the draft is tip their team’s hand.
Broncos head coach Sean Payton and general manager George Paton certainly didn’t Thursday. But they did make one thing clear seven days before Denver enters the first round of the draft needing a quarterback and holding the No. 12 pick: They’re open for business.
Up, down, sideways. Everything’s on the table.
“Do we have to draft a quarterback? You’d say it sure looks like we have to draft a quarterback,” Payton said. “And yet it has to be the right fit, the right one. If we had the tip sheets as to who everyone else is taking, it’d be easier to answer that question.
“That’s the puzzle here.”
Chicago is a near lock to take USC quarterback Caleb Williams No. 1 overall. After that, the pieces get jumbled fast. For a team like the Broncos, clarity on who may or may not be available and what trade options may or may not be on the table may only arrive in real time as the opening picks unfold.
“Part of the puzzle if we were looking at our draft board and at the screen and looking at team needs, there’s a handful of teams ahead of us where you’d say quarterback,” Payton acknowledged. “And then there’s a team or two, Minnesota, ourselves and the Raiders, where you could argue quarterback.
“That’s what makes this year a little interesting.”
One approach Payton and Paton each talked in generalities about Thursday and said remains on the table: Getting aggressive. There are circumstances in which they’d push all their chips to the middle of the table and move up. But those circumstances are drawn narrowly.
“If it’s a player you think can change the landscape of your organization moving forward, like a quarterback, then you do whatever it takes to get him,” said Paton, who’s historically more inclined to trade back. “If there’s consensus in the building and love in the building, then you try to get him. It doesn’t mean you’re going to get him, but you try.
“We’re open to everything. We’re wide open.”
The Broncos have spent the past three weeks in draft meetings setting their board. They’re past the thrust of those meetings and now have scouts and coaches split up across the building working through clusters of players that are graded closely together.
In fact, Payton and Paton have a haircut bet on which player at a certain position is taken first.
“We’ll spend four hours on 10 guys that we project in the fifth round and then maybe two of them are there (when we pick),” Paton said. “We’re doing all the work and then by the time you get to the fifth round a lot of them might be gone, so the board kind of falls the way it falls if you stack it correctly.”
They’ve also spent copious time on the phone with other teams. Paton said he’s had conversations with every team ahead of Denver in the draft order and many of the teams behind as he gets a feel for other teams’ willingness to jump up or move down.
“The hypothetical relative to what the compensation is is a lot of times driven by who else is interested,” Payton said. “So George has talked to all these teams in front of us. Obviously (it) depends on how much further you go up, but also if there’s someone else doing the same thing. That, George said it best, that’s certainly a possibility. Then it’s how much you can palate.”
The Broncos have put a lot of work into figuring out the answer to that question. They’ve attended pro days and hosted quarterbacks on visits and talked with them on the phone and poured over tape. Now in a week they’ll put the plan into action.
“It is a good quarterback class. There’s seven or eight quarterbacks that we think could play in the league one day,” Paton said. “… We think we can get a quarterback early. We think we can get one in the middle rounds. We think there are going to be quarterbacks throughout the draft that are interesting to us.”
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