MAIL TIME
From Rami Alkadri (@ramisvine): Is Jordan Love still going first round? I feel like he’s been dropping.
Rami, Love’s been a tough one to peg. Back at the end of the college season, I had one pretty successful exec say to me that the Utah State product was going to have a limited number of teams that would be head over heels for him—and those teams would make every effort to keep that affection under wraps, because he figured to be such a polarizing prospect. That made him sort of a less-accomplished version of what Patrick Mahomes was in 2017. And maybe it’s why it has been hard to ascertain who really likes him.
But there’s a pretty big difference in the two as they were coming out of college. While both were seen as difficult to evaluate because of the offenses they played in and free-wheeling style they employed, Mahomes’s production (41 TD, 10 INT in his final year) dwarfed Love’s (20 TD, 17 INT in 2019), and the former did a much better job carrying his team when it was overmatched than the latter did, something evidenced in games the two played against LSU (Love: 15-for-30, 130 yards, 0 TD, 3 INT; Mahomes: 28-for-56, 370 yards, 4 TDs, 0 INTs)
Still, the mystery in who can get past the quirks in the game tape, and in raw ability, can draw parallels between the two. So figuring where Love will go has been a little bit of a guessing game. The Chiefs, you’ll remember, guessed right three years ago—that the Saints were smitten—and jumped right in front of them at 10.
The one rumor that’s floated around out there, which I mentioned earlier in the week is that the Dolphins could take a tackle rather than a quarterback at No. 5, and circle back and grab Love later on. But Miami’s done a good job keeping everyone guessing. And if something like that doesn’t happen? It’s feasible Love’s draft weekend might wind up like that of another 2017 QB—DeShone Kizer, an assumed first-rounder at one point, who fell to the middle of the second round.
And if it seems like we’re all over the place here, it’s because the range for Love really does seem to be that wide.