21Apr
NFL draft week;The first anomaly of 2025.Albert Breer’s annual exercise in which he surveys the league to see which positions line up with which teams. Plus a detailed look at how the first round could play out.
A week before the 2025 NFL Draft kicks off in Green Bay, Wisconsin, every club still owns its first-round selection. The 2025 selection process marked the first year in the common era that all 32 teams possessed their first-round picks at the start of the new league year, per NFL Research.
The annual rundown of every team’s needs, we’ll have, as usual, all 32 teams listed. Every one of them has a first-round pick. Back in March, this group of 32 became the first in the common draft era (which dates back to 1967) to enter a new league year with every team ready for their first-round pick still in its original spot. Nearly six weeks later, that remains the case.
Why? The reasons will tell you plenty about this year’s class.
• Generally, there’ll be a point in the first round when teams don’t like what they’re looking at—either before the draft or during it—and will look to move picks into future years. Last year, given the strength of the 2024 class, you had a lot less of that. Six quarterbacks went in the top 12, including three widely seen as worthy of going first overall.
That pushed quality players at other positions down, and premium spots such as tackle (Joe Alt, JC Latham, Olu Fashanu) and receiver (Marvin Harrison Jr., Malik Nabers, Rome Odunze) were stocked. And that led to quality edge rushers (Chop Robinson) and corners (Quinyon Mitchell) going in the 20s. So, few teams were actively looking to trade 2024 picks for ’25 first-rounders.
• The one position that usually moves future first-rounders is, obviously, quarterback. But last year, need very much matched up with how the players came off the board. Of the six QBs to go in the top 12, only J.J. McCarthy was landed as part of a trade up, and the Minnesota Vikings only had to go up one spot—from 11 to 10—to get him;no 2025 first-rounders were moved as part of deals to get ’24 quarterbacks.
• There really weren’t any blockbuster veteran trades in 2024, for one reason or another. Most of the biggest names moved were older, banged-up or third-contract guys such as DeAndre Hopkins, Davante Adams, Amari Cooper and Marshon Lattimore—who no longer merited first-round picks in trade.
• This year, there’s really only one quarterback worth a trade into the top five, and that’s Miami’s Cam Ward (we’ll have more on that in this week’s draft QB column). With the team holding the top pick—the Titans—in need of a quarterback, a trade up to No. 1 has become a nonstarter.
• The makeup of the class is funky. After Ward goes to Tennessee, you’ve got two players, in Colorado’s two-way Heisman winner Travis Hunter and Penn State’s edge rusher Abdul Carter, who are clearly atop the class. After that, everyone has warts, potentially making picks No. 4 through 20 similar, and making some teams value the fourth or fifth pick this year like the 14th or 15th pick last year.
Perhaps if you’re the New York Giants or Cleveland Browns, going down two or three spots, value-wise, might feel like dropping 10 or 15 spots. So you’re going to want a premium for that pick, and other teams might be hesitant to give one up in a draft with a sweet spot on Day 2.
This is where we are, with a class, as Mr.Daniel Jeremiah and Mr.Todd McShay said to us two months ago, more loaded with starters rather than stars, and one built for team-building a lot more than it is built for television.
one thing it’s not lacking for is intrigue. Picks in the back half of the first round generally don’t get moved in the weeks leading up to the draft, so plenty of trades could come Thursday night. And because of how flat the first round is after Hunter and Carter, there’ll be an unpredictability to that first night that could lead to plenty of curveballs. Then, there’s the Shedeur Sanders story line, which will only grow the longer he lasts.
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