The NFL's Blue-Chip Shortage

Tom Pelissero opens his weekly check-in by flagging a pattern he has heard from coaches, scouts, and executives across the league. Thirteen days out from the draft, the number of true blue-chip players is smaller than he can remember. In most years the league agrees on twenty to twenty-two first-round grades. This year the number sits somewhere between thirteen and fifteen.

That math changes how the first round will move. Teams picking just outside the top ten may get stuck. If the specific position they need is gone, they either have to trade up aggressively or pivot and trade back. Pelissero expects a flurry of calls around the tenth pick because the sweet spot of the class lives in rounds two and three, where second-round grades will be plentiful and value will be easy to find on day two.

He points to the Jets as the team everyone is watching. A straw poll of league people lands on Texas Tech edge David Bailey as the likely pick, but nothing is confirmed. Half of Ohio State's defense will be in the green room, which means Arvell Reese, Sonny Styles, and Caleb Downs all have cases. Downs is a sure-fire safety who will go high, but Pelissero notes that taking a safety at number two carries its own questions. Those questions ripple through Arizona and Tennessee as well.

The quarterback class stays thin. Pelissero has found nothing in his reporting to push back on the prevailing read. Fernando Mendoza profiles as a starter, but nobody in the league puts him above Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels, or Drake Maye from recent classes. Ty Simpson has good tape, especially from the first half of last season, and the way he processes concepts is appealing. Size and the back half of last year create doubt about whether he is a true walk-in QB1.

The deeper intrigue sits with the next tier. Carson Beck, Garrett Nussmeier, and Drew Allar all played big-time college football and spent time on first-round boards. Any of the three could end up going in the second round or slide all the way to the fourth. All three have developmental upside. None of them currently have a team publicly convinced he is ready to start in year one.

Pelissero closes by flagging his upcoming quarterback story. The dynamic, he says, is not new, but the distance between reputation and evaluation has rarely been this wide heading into a draft week.