NFL Insider Tom Pelissero on Possible Draft Trades & Late-Round QB Sleepers

With the first round hours away, NFL Network insider Tom Pelissero used his stop on The Rich Eisen Show to map the trade lanes opening at the top of the board and to flag the late-round storylines that will outlast draft night.

Pelissero told Rich that the Cardinals at three and the Titans at four are both open to trading out, and that the Cowboys and Chiefs are the franchises most actively exploring a move up. "The Cowboys have certainly explored it. The Chiefs have explored trading up," Pelissero said, adding that Kansas City's needs at tackle, edge, and corner make tackle the most likely target if Andy Reid actually pulls the trigger. Pelissero singled out Spencer Fano and Francis Mauigoa as the two tackles realistic enough to chase into the top five, noting that Cleveland sitting at six creates urgency for any team that wants to get ahead of a Browns tackle pick.

The trade-back math gets more interesting at three, where Pelissero said the Jeremiah Love window opens and shuts quickly. "If he gets past five, I am shocked," Pelissero said, framing Love as possibly the best player in the draft and a candidate to either go to Arizona, Tennessee, or the Giants, or trigger a Cardinals trade-down designed to load up resources and slide back in for Ty Simpson at quarterback. Pelissero noted that Cardinals general manager Monti Ossenfort has run the trade-down, trade-up routine before and could do it again to get his quarterback at a price.

When Rich pivoted to storylines that carry beyond round one, Pelissero pointed first at Simpson, who will sit in the green room carrying the kind of pressure Will Levis, Brady Quinn, and Aaron Rodgers all wore. He then turned to Tennessee corner Jer'Zhan Newton, who Pelissero said is graded as a top-ten talent by evaluators across the league. The complication is medical: a cartilage defect in the knee that required a bone plug, with some doctors concerned the plug will need to be replaced in a procedure that triggers another long recovery. "Jer'Zhan Newton is not straight up off boards," Pelissero said, calling a first-round landing still a decent possibility because second-round picks routinely come off the board late in round one anyway.

Rich and Pelissero also acknowledged that no draft will recreate the Shedeur Sanders narrative arc, the kind of story Pelissero called "a day one story that lingers to day three," rare enough that Rich's own mother started calling about it.