Trust no one.
Fox Mulder would feel right at home as a GM in the NFL in the days leading up to the draft. Teams are pumping up players they don’t want and trying to drag down players they do. Take the Saints, who are bringing Matt Leinart in for a workout this week. Given the status of Drew Brees’ shoulder, it makes sense that they might use their #2 pick on Leinart as a backup plan. But Todd McShay has another theory [Insider subscription required]:
The Saints have been shopping their first-round pick since signing Brees, but they have not received the type of interest they had hoped for. With just two weeks left before the draft, they could be trying to drum up trade interest by courting Leinart. That would make Leinart’s workout for the Saints this week nothing more than a gigantic smokescreen to scare the Titans and Jets into trading up to get him.
The word out of Tennessee is that GM Floyd Reese’s opinion of Leinart differs with that of head coach Jeff Fisher and offensive coordinator Norm Chow. Reese appears to like Vince Young, while Fisher and Chow want Leinart. But is that all just a smokescreen as well? According to McShay, maybe:
Knowing all along that conventional wisdom would favor the Titans drafting Leinart because of his ties with Chow — USC’s offensive coordinator from 2001-04 — Reese could have expressed a preference for Young in order to throw off the Jets and keep them from cutting a deal with New Orleans to move up.
All of this posturing and out and out lying is what makes the draft so unpredictable. The Saints want to trade out of the #2 pick, but they still want OT D’Brickashaw Ferguson or DE Mario Williams, and they think they can get one of those players with the #3 or #4 pick. Whatever offers they’ve received thus aren’t up to snuff, so they bring in Leinart to get the Titans and Jets worried. The Titans, who probably want Leinart, know that the Saints probably aren’t going to take him and they want the Jets to believe that they might take Young instead, thinking that the Jets would be less likely to trade up if they thought Leinart would be there at #4.
Got that?
