Players With Wide Draft Ranges
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Welcome to the Friday edition of the Pick Six newsletter!
The month of June is usually a slow time in the NFL, but Tom Brady has single-handedly changed that this year. We're only 10 days into the month and he's already: Won a golf tournament with Aaron Rodgers, modeled underwear, dyed his hair orange and given his first press conference of the offseason.
I have no idea what Brady has in store for the rest of the month, but I won't be surprised if he buys a castle, adopts a kangaroo or goes to space. I mean, at this point, literally anything is on the table.
Speaking of Brady, we'll be taking a close look at what he had to say during his first press conference of the offseason on Thursday. We'll also be going over what Davante Adams had to say during his first meeting of the offseason with the media.
As always, here's your weekly reminder to tell all your friends to sign up for the newsletter. All you have to do is click here and then share the link. Let's get to the rundown.
Even though we're inching toward the slow part of the NFL offseason, things definitely haven't been slow this week. From Cooper Kupp's extension to Brady's first press conference in nearly five months, there's been a lot of news. To break it all down, I joined Will Brinson and Tyler Sullivan for Friday's episode of the Pick Six podcast.
During the episode, we spent a lot of time talking about the Rams and their team-building philosophy of "trade away all your draft picks for star players." It's definitely an interesting strategy, but it's also risky, which is probably why we haven't seen other NFL teams attempt to emulate them.
Basically, Les Snead has decided that he's going to run the Rams like an NBA franchise with a thought process of "we're going to get some superstars in here and then we're going to fill in the gaps with players who cost $2 million per year and then we're going to be competitive."
Four of those superstars -- Aaron Donald, Matthew Stafford, Jalen Ramsey and Cooper Kupp -- are going to eat up nearly 40% of the Rams' cap space in 2022. Most teams try to avoid letting just four players eat up that much space, but the Rams don't care because their philosophy just won them a Super Bowl.
If you're wondering how they can afford to keep handing out these big contracts, it's because Snead has no problem kicking the can down the road. The Saints once mastered this strategy with Drew Brees' contract, but it blew up in their face when the salary cap went down in 2020.
The good news for Snead is that he doesn't have to worry about this because the salary cap is expected to go up by $15 million to $20 million per year over the life of the new TV deal. Since the Rams have their core players under contract now, it will be easy for them to figure out how much salary cap space they'll have going forward, which is why it feels like they have a strong Super Bowl window for at least the next two to three years. On the other hand, a team like the Ravens has no idea what their cap situation will look like over the next few years because they don't know what kind of cap hit they're going to take each season from a potential new contract for Lamar Jackson.
If you want to listen to today's episode, where he also cover Brady's first press conference in five months, then be sure to click here. You can also watch today's episode on YouTube by clicking here.
It's been nearly three months since Brady announced that he was returning to football, and somehow, he managed to go that entire three-month period without holding a press conference. Fortunately for us, that drought ended on Thursday when Brady finally met with the media. During the presser, he spent a good chunk of time answering questions about everything that came up this offseason from his relationship with Bruce Arians to whether he flirted with the Dolphins.
Here's a look at everything he had to say :
Of all the subjects he touched on, I find the Dolphins thing especially interesting because it's pretty clear that he had talks with them. That's important to remember because Brady is going to be a free agent after the 2022 season, which means he'll be free to sign with anyone. If he was talking to Miami this year, it wouldn't be surprising at all to see him having a conversation with them in 2023.
Brady wasn't the only star NFL player to hold his first press conference of the offseason on Thursday, so did Adams, and like Brady, the Raiders receiver had a lot of interesting things to say.
Let's take a look at what was on Adams' mind:
Adams signed a five-year, $141.25 million contract with the Raiders after the trade. As far as his family goes, Adams is from the West Coast and it's pretty clear that he wanted to get back closer to them after spending eight seasons in Green Bay.
From free agency to the draft to making trades, it's been a busy offseason for every team in the AFC. One thing that's always true about the offseason is that some moves are better than others and since we wanted to know which ones were the best, we had Cody Benjamin come up with a list of the best move made by each AFC team this offseason.
Here's the best move made by five of those teams:
If you want to see the full list, which features all 16 AFC teams, then be sure to click here .
Apparently, this newsletter is only covering AFC teams today. After going over the best move made by each AFC team this offseason, we're now going to look at one under-the-radar player for each AFC team who could turn into a star in 2022.
Here's the list, which was put together by Jeff Kerr.
If you want to see the full list of under-the-radar players in the AFC, then be sure to click here .
It's been a wild 24 hours in the NFL, and since it's nearly impossible to keep track of everything that happened, I went ahead and put together a roundup for you.
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