Payton will look to fill holes in free agency, draft BPA
By Ty Anania
It’s early mock draft season. Media outlets are starting to tie specific players with the New Orleans Saints. But before free agency, these mock drafts are more shots in the dark than anything else.
It’s fun to do mock drafts. It’s fun to read mock drafts. Hell, I’m sure Who Dat Dish will release some of their own New Orleans Saints mocks very shortly.
But until the free agency period, there’s really no telling what will be the roster makeup of a team. Much less the teams above them in the draft order. Everything could change, or nothing could.
As of now, most mocks are pairing the Saints with DE Derek Barnett out of Tennessee. Now, to be clear, I love the pick. The Saints are desperately in need of more talent at DE, and Barnett is just that. Paul Kruger won’t cut it in 2017. And at this point in the last offseason, most media outlets already had us paired with Sheldon Rankins. So it’s not like these mocks have no bearing on reality.
But it’s the expressed attitude of Sean Payton and Mickey Loomis to approach the draft with a BPA mindset. Look for the best player available. That means: fill whatever holes the team has in free agency, so that you enter the draft without needing to reach for any position.
With that in mind, you can be sure the Saints will go after a veteran DE before the draft. They’ll likely do the same for OG, and possibly for CB.
And if all goes well, they’ll enter the draft without any major holes on the roster.
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Of course, that likely won’t preclude them from drafting a DE in the first round. Chances are, none of the players they’ll sign in free agency will be sure-things, just given the amount of holes the team needs to fill. So depth and competition will be welcome.
But it will open up the door for them to draft elsewhere, if the cards fall that way. Think back to 2015, when the New Orleans Saints drafted Andrus Peat in the first round instead of going defense, as most mocks had them doing.
Peat, for all his ups and downs, has been a solid pick. And the team will need more like him if they want to ascend out of the NFL’s midfield.
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And drafting players like Peat starts with plugging holes in free agency, in order to draft the best player available. It’s what the Saints have always done, and it’s what they’ll do this year.