The Patriots could have addressed one of several needs with the 23rd overall pick in this year’s NFL draft.
Instead, New England made a value play.
Bill Belichick and Co. dealt their first-round pick to the Los Angeles Chargers, who moved up 14 spots to select Oklahoma linebacker Kenneth Murray. The Patriots, in turn, received the Bolts’ early picks in both the second and third rounds.
While ESPN’s Seth Walder questions the deal from Los Angeles’ perspective, he believes it was a home run for New England. The analytics guru tabbed the Pats-Chargers deal as the second-best in-draft trade, which he believes New England handily won.
From Walder:
You can win at the draft two ways: by being better than other teams at evaluating incoming talent or by amassing a higher volume of expected output. The Patriots have the self-awareness to recognize that they’re more likely to achieve the latter than the former. Heck, the former might be impossible. Trades such as this from Bill Belichick are hardly new, so it wasn’t surprising to see him deal out of the first round.
Of course, not every trade the Patriots made was a positive from a value perspective (more on that in a bit). From the Chargers’ point of view, this is the kind of deal that we wouldn’t criticize if it were for a quarterback; the position has so much more upside than others that you have to think of those trades in a different category. But for an inside linebacker? This was inadvisable, as great as Kenneth Murray could become.
The Patriots spent the 37th overall pick on safety Kyle Dugger, who’s also a lethal punt returner. They then included the 71st overall pick in a package to trade up to No. 60, where they selected Michigan linebacker Josh Uche. Both players are poised to make impacts in Foxboro from Day 1.
So yeah, we can’t imagine the Patriots regret trading out of the first round.
