Friday, April 24, 2009

A Surprise Top-10 Pick? Noooo Waaaay....

by: Mike Parker

There's just over 24 hours until the draft (and also 24 hours until I anticipate returning to a normal sleeping pattern), and the last-minute rumors are beginning to circulate quite heavily.

Mike Florio at ProFootballTalk says a surprise top-10 pick has been among league chatter today, and that's, well, no surprise. Florio thinks it will be WR Percy Harvin to the Oakland Raiders at No.7 overall. Maybe Al Davis will trade up for another first-round pick and also grab BJ Raji, just to make sure the bad boy quota is officially reached and enough opposing teams get effectively punched in the face next year. (Hey, who knows, it might be in John Marshall's gameplan by now.)

The Patriots could be looking to move into the top 10 as well, as SI's Peter King reports here. King:

Executives from two teams tell me New England offered its first-round pick and middle of three second-round picks (the 23rd and 47th picks overall) to Jacksonville for the eighth pick in the draft.
This would cut New England down to only 25 picks in the first two rounds this year, right?

Also, King is on the LSU DE Tyson Jackson bandwagon, saying that he's the best 3-4 end in the draft. Jackson could be Bill Belichick's highly-coveted secret this year, but the Chiefs would be smart to grab a versatile player like him, since they haven't had a legitimate pass rush threat after trading away Jared Allen to the Vikings for a king's ransom. Why not use a top-5 pick to grab a potential replacement? He'd be a better fit for the Chiefs than Aaron Curry anyway (who I would love to see fall to No.4, incidentally...)

So, addicts - what do you see as the most likely top-10 surprise pick? If I had to guess, I'd say it would either be Darius Heyward-Bey to the Jags at No.8, or Mark Sanchez falling out of the top 10 entirely. (Or Al Davis turning into Godzilla, but that doesn't count.)

At the rate this is going, this draft is setting up to have a crazier ending than "The Usual Suspects!" Who's taking Keyser Soze in the first??

END