Ashton Jeanty the Target for Teams Wanting to Trade Up Into the Top 10

What I'm Hearing About the NFL Draft | Albert Breer

One day left before the NFL draft kicks off in Green Bay. Let’s dive into what I’m hearing …

• If there’s a player who will elicit a trade up into the top 10, I think it will be Boise State RB Ashton Jeanty—whether it’s the Denver Broncos taking a big swing or the Chicago Bears making a shorter move to leapfrog another team.

The reason, to me, is simple: After Travis Hunter and Abdul Carter are picked, this year’s class is short on blue-chip talent. But in a mess of relative mediocrity, Jeanty is the real deal.

To simplify the point, if you’re looking at a player who could easily project into (eventually) becoming top five at his position, it may be just Hunter, Carter and Jeanty. Will Campbell, Armand Membou and Kelvin Banks Jr. are all good tackle prospects. Will any of them ever be top 10 at the position? Jalon Walker’s an exciting player, but will he become one of the league’s premier pass rushers? Or is there a better shot Jeanty becomes that kind of tailback?

Bottom line: The Jacksonville Jaguars, Denver or Chicago could look at Jeanty and see a player who could stabilize your offense, and put your quarterback in second-and-6 and third-and-2 more often, and give him lay-ups in the passing game.

If you remember what Ezekiel Elliott did for Dak Prescott or what Todd Gurley did for Jared Goff early in those quarterbacks’ careers, you can see the vision for what Jeanty might be able to do for Trevor Lawrence, Caleb Williams or Bo Nix. And maybe understand why he’d be more valuable than a good-not-great player at another position.

• We’ve been over this, but just about everyone in the top 10 has sniffed around on trading down. The New England Patriots and Las Vegas Raiders are open to it. The Jaguars have made calls to explore the idea of it this week.

But there’s one team that’s been a little more aggressive than the rest and that’s the Panthers, who have the eighth pick. My understanding is they’re willing to take a discount to move down in an effort to try to build up their war chest of picks. It’s interesting, too, because Carolina isn’t hurting for volume with two fourths and three fifths.

For the Panthers, it’s an effort to try and build up more capital for Day 2, where the strength of this year’s draft is, and/or 2026, with the knowledge that, this year, there might not be a huge difference from the eighth pick to the 18th selection.

• Two of the more fascinating prospects this year are Ole Miss DT Walter Nolen and Tennessee DE James Pearce Jr. Both have faced character questions. Nolen’s practice habits and sense of entitlement have been questioned, while Pearce is seen as a bit edgy, and had a reputation for being divisive in college.

But both are wildly talented. Nolen is seen by many I’ve talked to as the highest ceiling defensive tackle in the class. Pearce has burst and get-off as a pass rusher that only Abdul Carter can match.

The feeling I’ve gotten from most folks I’ve talked to is that, for both guys, going to the right place will be vital. As we wrote Monday in our needs column, I believe Nolen comes into play right outside the top 10, with the San Francisco 49ers and Miami Dolphins potential landing spots. Pearce, I think, could go as high as 15th to the Atlanta Falcons. Because of the questions, though, each guy could also slide. So there’s a wide range of outcomes for both.

• Another guy facing a wide range of outcomes is Arizona WR Tetairoa McMillan.

Perception of the 22-year-old had slipped a bit since the fall, when people assumed he’d go in the top 10-or-so picks. When I sent a mock I threw together (I’ll do one early on that I don’t make public as an exercise) around the end of March, I had McMillan going 23rd to the Packers. A few scouts responded that I had McMillan in the right neighborhood and that he could go behind Texas’s Matthew Golden.

Because McMillan ran in the mid-to-high 4.5s at his pro day, I still think he could be there in the 20s. But I’m less sure of it than I was a couple of weeks ago. I could see him going as high as the fifth pick to Jacksonville or to a couple of teams in the middle of the round, in part because of the lack of supply at the receiver position.

• One thing you’re hearing a lot of right now is how there’s going to be this explosion of quarterback picks at the top of the second round. I’d be cautious because that rarely happens. Going back to 2000, here’s the number of quarterbacks selected in the first three rounds, sorted by round …

First round: 75
Second round: 24
Third round: 33

In other words, over the past 25 years, we’ve averaged less than one QB per year in the second round. The last time multiple quarterbacks went in the second round was 2014 (Derek Carr, Jimmy Garoppolo), and one of those two was taken with the third-to-last pick of the round. Only once over that 25-year span have three QBs gone in the second round—Kevin Kolb, John Beck and Drew Stanton in ’07. And Jalen Hurts is the only second-round QB over the past 10 drafts to get a second contract with his first team.

So why is this? My theory has always been that if you think a guy can be your long-term starting quarterback, you’re taking him in the first round. If you don’t think a guy can be that, you probably aren’t spending a second- or even third-round pick on him.

And history shows us that in that range, there are way more guys like Kyle Trask and DeShone Kizer than there are guys like Hurts, Carr, Garoppolo or Drew Brees.

• I got a fun comp on North Carolina’s Omarion Hampton from a GM this week: Nick Chubb.

Hampton’s an interesting guy in that he’s a bigger back who can play all three downs. Because of that, teams see him and Jeanty in a bit of a different category than Ohio State’s TreVeyon Henderson, who projects more like Jahmyr Gibbs did coming out two years ago (where Jeanty and Hampton would be deployed more like Bijan Robinson).

For what it’s worth, I know some teams view Henderson as the draft’s second-best back.

• Last year, I wrote that Duke C Graham Barton was the “Trent McDuffie” of the 2024 class—in that he was a safe, middle-of-the-fairway type of pick, as a guy with exemplary football character and the versatility to do a lot of things for a team.

I think North Dakota State OL Grey Zabel is that guy this year.

He can start at four of five line positions, is tough and smart, and could become a team captain while still on his rookie contract (there’s some disagreement over whether his best position is center or guard). I think he could go as high as 12 to Dallas and is likely off the board by the end of the teens, with Seattle lurking at 18.

• We’ve told you about Walker’s exemplary football character, and how one team told me he was “like a defensive coordinator” on the board for them. And along those lines, I got another pretty cool anecdote the other day on the Georgia linebacker.

A lot of teams ask players, If you could take one teammate with you to the pros, who would it be? It’s a good way for scouts and coaches to cross-check players, and also get a feel for who the most respected guys are. In the bigger programs putting more prospects in the pros, a team might get a variety of answers, based on positions or sides of the ball.

So this was pretty wild: One executive told me every single Georgia player they sat down with answered that Walker was the player they’d take to the pros with them.

• Scheme changes can, obviously, influence how teams view players.

So I did ask around a little on how Notre Dame DC Al Golden will impact how the Bengals look at defensive players. And one thing that came back is that you’d see more 3-4 fronts and a lot of man coverage. Golden, of course, will also give Cincinnati the edge of having insight into players he coached, recruited and coached against over the past three years at Notre Dame.

• There remain a lot of unknowns past the first four picks, and the reason for that is what you’d think it is.

“It’s as unpredictable a first round as I can remember in all my years, because of the lack of high-end athletes at the top,” says one GM. “It’s a crapshoot.”

So buckle up.