OTAs are creeping up on us. So we’ve got one foot there, another still in the NFL draft and our eyes on everything else, too, in this week’s takeaways …
Arch Manning
It’s time to stop the madness on Arch Manning. And I’d advise everyone to do what Manning’s own family has: Let the kid be what he is right now.
That is a college quarterback entering his redshirt sophomore year, and his first as the full-time starter at a historic blueblood program. Manning got into two games during his redshirt season, throwing a total of five passes and logging three carries, all of which accounted for 37 yards. Last year, he flashed, starting two games, getting into 10 and completing 61-of-90 passes for 939 yards, nine touchdowns and two picks. He also ran for 108 yards and four touchdowns on 25 carries, punctuated by a 67-yard touchdown run against UTSA.
He’s listed at 6' 4" and 225 pounds. He has the pedigree of a grandfather who was drafted with a No. 2 pick and two uncles who somehow both went even higher than that.
I get it. Everyone’s excited. You should be. It’s a great story.
But, for now, for NFL teams, that’s really all it is. There’s not anywhere near enough to go on to know whether he’ll be a top-five pick or a fifth-rounder down the line. Lots of folks thought Quinn Ewers, whom Manning is succeeding at Texas, was destined to be a first-round pick when he became Texas’s starter in 2022. He went in the seventh round.
Which is to say, with all due respect, a recruiting ranking and a fun early highlight reel will need to be a precursor to a whole lot more if Manning’s going to be drafted as high as the other quarterbacks in his family once were.
“I get that everyone’s excited,” one AFC college scouting director told me. “That run happened and people started talking—they’re almost surprised with that last name that he has that speed, and the ability to generate big plays with his legs, and he gets transformed into this elite prospect. The reality is we haven’t really seen him run the offense with any consistency yet. And that’s not his fault, he just hasn’t played.
“What are we looking at? You’d like to watch a quarterback in double-digit games to really evaluate them. … At other positions, you might get a feel after watching four games and have a good idea of who a guy is. The quarterback position is much different, it requires a much larger bank of film. You want to see him against a variety of different looks. In college, the talent is not as concentrated, so you want to see him against an Alabama or a Georgia.”
In other words, you want to see him after defenses start to game plan for him, and against teams that won’t be overwhelmed by Texas’s array of stars—his two starts last year were against Mississippi State, which went 0–8 in the SEC, and UTSA. Ideally, teams want college quarterbacks to have at least 25 starts, so the volume of things they’ve seen is large enough to get a full assessment.
“You just don’t know until they’re really playing,” said another AFC college scouting director. “Right now, the body of work is too small. We’ve seen big guys with talent, the tools, the arm, that don’t know how to process, and don’t have the accuracy to all levels of the field consistently enough. What we have on [Manning] isn’t nearly enough. You could guess, but that’s really all you’ll be doing—guessing.”
Again, that’s not to say there isn’t a lot of promise here. There’s a ton. He’s shown plus athleticism—more like his grandfather (Archie) or his dad (Cooper) than his uncles (Peyton and Eli)—and plenty of arm on a frame that’s close to the NFL prototype. He’s also, as I understand it, a popular figure in the Longhorns’ program, carrying a swagger and confidence that allows him to connect with teammates from all walks of life. And those teammates were excited to see what he could do when he got in games last year, which is a sign of what he’s shown them in practice.
His mechanics are sound—“the way he sets up in the pocket, he looks like a Manning,” said the first college director—and he looks well-coached already.
Which is a start.
Then, there’s the family history, which would make you think (and most NFL people do) that there’s very little chance he’ll come out after a single season of starting. Peyton Manning started for four years at Tennessee and returned for his senior year despite the likelihood he’d have gone No. 1 to Bill Parcells’s New York Jets in 1997. Eli Manning started three years at Ole Miss and came back in 2003, even with a consensus he was going in the first round that April.
All that, by the way, was also without the benefit of NIL money to make staying in college more enticing.
As for Arch himself, his dad has done all he can to keep Arch’s trajectory as natural and old-school as possible. As a high school recruit, he kept as low a profile as possible, rarely doing interviews or popping up on social media. He had to set up a Twitter account to commit to Texas. Three years later, it is one of just five posts to his name. And his family is aware of the benefit a quarterback gets in the raw amount of starts he makes in college ahead of going to the NFL. Even after this year, Manning will be well below that 25-start threshold.
So keep putting Manning first in your 2026 mocks if you want. And I’ll keep thinking it’s way more likely we see him in ’27 or ’28.
James Pearce Jr. trade
I love digging into the backstories of how draft picks come together, and there’s a good one relating to the Atlanta Falcons’ call to move up from the second round back into the first. And it started at the combine, after the pass-rush-starved team met with Tennessee DE James Pearce Jr.—and felt good enough about the interview that they arranged with agents Tory Dandy and Brandon Abdala to visit Pearce’s hometown of Charlotte.
A few weeks later, when a Falcons contingent led by GM Terry Fontenot touched down in North Carolina, it was pouring rain. Fontenot looked at the forecast, saw the rain wouldn’t break, and texted to agents to tell them they’d scrap the workout, not wanting to be a prospect in a situation where he’d risk injury that close to the draft. Dandy told Fontenot that Pearce was insistent. Fontenot responded that Pearce didn’t need to worry about it. Dandy responded that Pearce was already trying to find an indoor facility to rent out.
In the end, they agreed, instead, to meet at the house that Pearce had bought his mother in the area, and then bring him to Atlanta for a 30 visit thereafter, where he’d spend extensive one-on-time with Fontenot, coach Raheem Morris and defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich.
But the whole experience helped the Falcons complete the picture on a player who was widely seen as a character risk—someone who was rumored to have been divisive and difficult within the Tennessee program. In the end, after sitting down with Pearce and a slew of people from his past, the team saw a guy who loves football, is hyper-competitive and has smarts, and the Falcons were willing to bet on Morris’s program to help him grow up.
Because of all that, they were ready to take him at No. 15.
Then came the twist they didn’t expect, where Jalon Walker, who could’ve gone as high as No. 4, started falling. And when the Indianapolis Colts chose to pick at No. 14, and not trade, Atlanta’s draft room erupted before even hearing Tyler Warren’s name. Walker impressed the Falcons as he had just about everyone else—every Georgia player told the brass, when asked what teammate they’d bring with them to the pros, that Walker would be the guy. And Walker impressed Fontenot when he came to Atlanta’s local pro day to cheer on friends working out there.
Morris has already had some success deploying another hybrid, in seventh-year pro Kaden Elliss, and envisions using Walker in a supersized version of that role.
So getting Walker was surprising and exhilarating, and also the beginning of the exploration to see if they could still get Pearce, and wind up with two guys they saw as top-five talents in the entire class, who would both address the team’s biggest need. And sitting at No. 46, they made the conscious decision to dangle their 2026 first-rounder, with a caveat—without a third-rounder (traded last August for Matthew Judon) they wanted to get a Day 2 pick back.
Conceptually, the idea was that if they went up for Pearce, they’d simply be getting next year’s first-rounder a year early, at the cost of knocking their pick on Day 2 down. The calls started at around No. 20, where the Denver Broncos were picking, and heated up with the Houston Texans at No. 25, Los Angeles Rams at No. 26 and Baltimore Ravens at No. 27. The Falcons were competing, at No. 25, with a New York Giants team that had a high second-rounder and was going up for a quarterback. Baltimore GM Eric DeCosta told the Falcons he’d have to be blown away to give up his spot in the first round.
Talks intensified with the Rams, and Los Angeles’s willingness to give up the 101st pick at the end of the third round—which the Rams had actually gotten, interestingly enough, for Atlanta hiring Morris away from them—was what pushed it over the goal line for the Falcons, who agreed to throw a seventh-round pick in as a sweetener. So, as Atlanta saw, they got next year’s first-round pick a year early for knocking a pick down 55 slots (from 46 to 101) and a seventh.
And in a lot of ways, working that hard to land both Walker and Pearce is a lot like taking Michael Penix Jr. last year. Both moves were costly. But if they add up to long-term answers at premium positions, no one will be too hung up on the toll the Falcons paid to get it done.
Kirk Cousins
While we’re there, options for Kirk Cousins and the Falcons to part ways are dwindling. As we wrote a couple of months ago, there were really three “deadlines” in this saga …
• March 15, when a $10 million roster bonus for 2026 would vest as fully guaranteed.
• April 24 to 26, when the draft would further clarify teams’ quarterback depth charts.
• Late July, when training camps open.
Atlanta held on to Cousins through the first deadline, locking in his $10 million guarantee for next year—which pushes the full guarantee on the contract he signed in 2024 from $90 million to $100 million. Then, last weekend, the Falcons kept Cousins through the second deadline, as teams drafted and their rosters grew closer to completion, leaving less space for veteran additions thereafter and more defined pecking orders.
Now, to review, Cousins met with Falcons owner Arthur Blank on the night of March 5 to plead his case to be released or traded as the start of the league year and the vesting date loomed. After the first wave of free agency passed, and the guarantee vested, Cousins got word out to teams that he would use his no-trade clause to block any trade until after the draft, because he wanted to avoid another situation like the one he was in last year, when the Falcons drafted Penix No. 8 less than two months after signing Cousins.
So another window opened after the first round of the draft, and there wasn’t much action on him. The Pittsburgh Steelers are still waiting for Aaron Rodgers. The Minnesota Vikings were only going to consider a reunion at this point if the Falcons ate a big chunk of his salary—and, absent that, Minnesota traded for a much cheaper alternative in Sam Howell on the draft’s third day. The Cleveland Browns put a fourth quarterback on their roster in the third round and a fifth in the fifth round.
That leaves Cousins without a logical destination, and the Falcons with a rather expensive second-string quarterback, who’s now guaranteed $27.5 million in base salary for this year.
Realistically, at this point, it seems like the two possible exit doors for Cousins open if the Steelers don’t land Rodgers or another quarterback gets hurt somewhere. But even if there’s an injury, it’d have to happen before the trade deadline. And there’s a chance that Cousins wouldn’t want to uproot his family—and could thus block a trade if he doesn’t like the destination.
Bill Belichick
There were lots of judgments made and jokes told last week about Bill Belichick, and I do think, in the end, it will have an impact on his ability to return to the NFL. We’ve all seen his contract. The buyout for an NFL team to pry him from North Carolina drops from $10 million to $1 million less than four weeks from now. That, more or less, reads like an invitation for the pros to try to poach him back from college football in 2026.
Whether the pros accept that invitation is another story. And if you ask me now what the last week or so did to affect that, I’d say the equation in an owner’s head may have been altered a little bit. Or maybe more than just a little bit.
When you hire a coach, you take everything that comes with it into account. If you look, then, at what’s happened at UNC, you’ll see the school has taken on a lot of non-football water—what Belichick might have categorized as “distractions” in the past—over the first five months of his employment. Yes, that can be washed away to a degree with wins, but the chance to get those is still four months away.
So UNC (which, by the way, has a lot of powerful academics who don’t care if the ball is puffed or stuffed, and don’t view football success as a priority) will have to get through nine months of this stuff for, they hope, maybe three or four years of winning. And if the Tar Heels win, the question of Belichick returning to the NFL will arise again.
The math in the NFL then would not be far off from what UNC is dealing with. In other words, an owner would have to decide whether he or she would want to take on eight months of everything that comes with the greatest coach ever just to get to that first win, and maybe two or three seasons of having him on the sideline. Remember, the second Belichick is hired, he’ll become the face of whatever franchise he’s joining.
It's complicated. Some teams will decide, like I think a couple did in January, to take easier, cheaper, more conventional routes. I’ve long thought an owner looking for credibility would take a real swing at landing Belichick in 2026. But I’m not nearly as sure about that anymore.
Yes, it’s a free country. Belichick can do what he wants. But we saw four years of what he looked like in the NFL without Tom Brady, and now we’ve seen half a year of what he looks like stripped of the infrastructure he worked so hard to build in Foxborough a quarter century ago. To me, that’s as relevant to his future as, and maybe more so than, whom he’s dating. Essentially, it’s not that he’s with a 24-year-old—it’s what he put her in charge of.
Mykel Williams
I think there’s a chance the NFL will rue letting Mykel Williams get to 11. This was an important draft for the San Francisco 49ers. They’re resetting their roster in a lot of areas. And in one spot in particular, they knew they’d have a lot of work to do—which is why they got a pretty nice jump in the fall on studying the defensive linemen that would be in the draft.
So it was that, when GM John Lynch and directors of player personnel Tariq Ahmad and RJ Gillen started diving in on the college guys in the fall, they came across Georgia’s athletic freak of a 20-year-old edge rusher. In Williams, whom they had high on their list from his sophomore tape, they saw a long, strong, heavy-handed athlete capable of toggling inside and outside, like guys they’ve had play their “big end” position (Arik Armstead, Arden Key, Charles Omenihu) have in the past.
The wild thing is at that point, they didn’t even know he was playing hurt. He suffered a significant high ankle sprain in Georgia’s season opener, came back less than a month later and played the rest of the season through it. The Bulldogs didn’t want anyone to know. Williams didn’t either. But the reality was he wasn’t himself. And he was still a dominant run-stopper and a rusher who, even without the sacks, consistently affected the passer.
Which means, as I see it, there’s more upside here than a lot of people realize.
Once they got into the draft process, and involved their coaches, things only ramped up on San Francisco’s affection for Williams. Defensive line coach Kris Kocurek, after watching him, called Williams the best edge-setter in college football. When Lynch and Kyle Shanahan sat him down on his 30 visit and asked him, third down in the Super Bowl, where do you want us to line you up, his answer was, “over the guard”—illustrating his versatility, and the tough-guy nature to his game apparent in how he played through the injury.
So this guy who was ID’d as a future No. 1 overall pick when he flashed as a true freshman on a national title team might have a shot to become that type of player. The Niners’ feelings on that were pretty clear when they tried to do a deal with the Carolina Panthers at No. 8, and jump the New Orleans Saints, who were said to be smitten with Williams, to get him.
And his selection was the tip of the iceberg in the 49ers’ reworking of their defensive line room. In third-rounder Alfred Collins, a mountain of a defensive tackle from Texas, the Niners are getting a guy with an 85-inch wingspan who might help remind fans there of when San Francisco had twin redwoods, in Armstead and DeForest Buckner, in the middle. Then, in the fourth round, the Niners got Indiana DT CJ West, whom they live-scouted at Ohio State in the fall—and who, on tape, lived in the backfield for the Hoosiers.
With those two, at a baseline, the Niners are confident they’re getting stout run-stuffers with a lot of pass-rush potential that still hasn’t been fully mined. Combine that with the addition of a bookend for Nick Bosa in Williams, and there’ll be a lot of new faces up front for Kocurek and new/old DC Robert Saleh.
And I do get the sense they feel like this change will, with a little patience, be for the best.
Tennessee Titans
I’m optimistic about where the Tennessee Titans are headed, and what they’re going to put around Cam Ward in the fall. And that’s in part because I think being so ahead on the quarterback assessments bought them time, in the end, to focus on everything else they wanted to accomplish in their first draft with GM Mike Borgonzi and a reshaped front office in place. I think two picks from last weekend in particular can illustrate that.
The first was Penn State safety Kevin Winston Jr. His final season as a Nittany Lion ended in September, with a partial tear to his ACL leading to surgery. It caused teams to back off him a bit—which is understandable. But the Titans had him at the top of the second round, grade-wise, as a guy with the size and strength to play close to the line, and speed and range to play deep. They could feel his impact on tape.
Raw speed was a question. He wasn’t ready to run at the combine. But weeks later, at his pro day, just six months out from surgery, he clocked a 4.5 in the 40-yard dash for the scouts on hand. Which showed his rehab was going well, his determination to show the NFL people what he had and also the potential he was actually a little faster than that.
The Titans got him with the 82nd pick.
Then, there was Texas TE Gunnar Helm. A hyper-productive weapon in a star-studded group of skill players, the 4.84 Helm ran in Indy cratered his stock. But digging deeper, you’d see that on his first try, he had a false start and, as he pivoted back to the line, he badly sprained his ankle. He gutted it out and ran his two 40s, albeit much slower than he’d have liked, and afterward his ankle was black and blue all over. At pro day, because of the ankle, he didn’t attempt another 40, but fought through drills.
The Titans snapped him up with the 120th pick.
So if you figure that Tennessee got these two guys a round later than maybe they should’ve gone, because of injuries that are now healing up—allowing for them to play roles as rookies—then the Titans did some good work here.
Fifth-year options
NFL teams showed us the viability of fifth-year options this year. If you count Texans CB Derek Stingley Jr.’s extension (which effectively means Houston would’ve picked up his option, absent the deal), NFL teams collectively picked up 19 options on the 32 first-rounders from three years ago. That beats the number the NFL had last year by one, using the same math (with big-money extensions counted), with both far outdistancing the 2023 figure of 13.
What can we take away from that?
Well, option decisions made in 2023 (which were on fifth-year options players played under this past season), were the first under which the option was fully guaranteed, something that was negotiated into the new CBA, with the previous CBA having options only guaranteed for injury. Teams, naturally, were more hesitant to pick them up the first year, and a scattershot first round—just 13 of the 32 picks remain with the teams that drafted them—fed into that.
Last year, things swung back a bit, with a deeper class (20 first-rounders are still with their drafting teams), and a year of data to work with, setting the stage for more teams to pick up the options. With the cap exploding, it also was becoming increasingly palatable for teams to take on the lump sum totals that come in the option year.
In most cases, these are placeholders either for a new deal, or to hold a player over for a year so a team can decide whether to give him one. Because they’re now tiered, price-wise, by performance, the number is usually reasonable if the pick pans out. With that taken into account, obviously, if it’s not a good deal for the team, the team won’t pick it up.
Ravens center Tyler Linderbaum is Exhibit A. He’s become perhaps the NFL’s best at his position, and a cornerstone in the Baltimore locker room. But because offensive line positions aren’t broken up the way defensive line or secondary positions are, Linderbaum’s option number is based on the top tackle’s contract (since those are the highest-paid linemen). So that figure is $23.4 million, which is well above the $18 million average-per-year contract that tops the center market, the deal belonging to the Chiefs’ Creed Humphrey.
Thus, Baltimore declined the option, because it would give Linderbaum too much leverage in negotiating a long-term contract. Another example would be Jaguars LB Devin Lloyd, a good player that Jacksonville would like to keep, but one whose positional designation is tied to a premium spot, with edge rushers being part of the linebacker math jacking up the price.
And that illustrates the whole issue—these aren’t fair-play mechanisms. They’re there to give teams leverage over players in contract negotiations and control over players’ rights deeper into their careers.
Packers defensive tackle Devonte Wyatt is another good example of how this works. Having had a five-year college career, he was 24 coming into the league. He’s 27 now. Green Bay picked up his option, at $12.9 million, a bargain for a really good interior defensive lineman. He’ll be 28 when he plays on the option, if the Packers don’t extend him. Green Bay then could franchise tag him in 2027, if it so chose, and he’d be 29 going into that season. Which means he easily could be getting his first crack at free agency at 30 years old.
By then, he’d have made about $26 million on his rookie contract, and probably at least that much on the tag. So he’d be over $50 million in career earnings—but the ship may have sailed on him making the kind of splash someone like Milton Williams did in March.
Which is sort of how the sausage is made here.
Commanders’ stadium
The Washington Commanders’ new stadium looks fantastic. I don’t really want to get into the debate over public vs. private financing here, mostly because I know these deals are all different. I do feel like there are a lot of things that need to be funded before you get around to investing the public wealth into a football stadium, but I don’t know enough about this deal yet to really discuss the ins and outs of it.
With that established, there are a couple of things that stuck out about it to me.
The first is what it’ll mean for D.C. Having the team back in the district, as I see it, is a win for everyone. I’m an evangelist when it comes to this stuff—teams should be in the cities they represent. I like what it does for the cities. I like what it can do for neighborhoods and businesses. And I love how big games feel in places like Seattle and New Orleans and Baltimore, when you see people walking through the streets to the game.
Second, there’s the fact that we’ll get a Super Bowl in D.C. It’ll probably be Super Bowl LXVI in February 2032—at the end of the second season of the new stadium, if everything goes according to the plan—and that’ll be fantastic. I think Washington will be an awesome city for that kind of thing.
Now, the third piece of this is what I don’t like, which is that it’s indoors. I wish they’d at least put retractable roofs on the domes, if they insist on building domes. But the reality of this, and putting turf down, is that these stadiums are way too expensive now to be built for 10 football games a year, and the roof allows for cities to bring big events to town year-round, which helps to justify the cost.
So, yeah, it’s not exactly how I’d have drawn it up.
But I’m excited to see what the Commanders make of it.
Prank calls
The prank call situation is pretty wild. So here’s what I’d say—my opinion has changed a little on this. I still think demonizing a 20-year-old for being a knucklehead is a bit much. But as for how this sort of information gets out, after digging around, I do understand why the league is taking it so seriously, and trying to create deterrents for people with access.
This week, the league fined the Falcons $250,000 and their DC Jeff Ulbrich $100,000, after Ulbrich’s college-aged son prank called Shedeur Sanders, pretending to be Saints GM Mickey Loomis, on draft weekend. The revelation of the call, which got out through Sanders’s social media, sparked a bevy of other players in the draft saying they’d been pranked too—so clearly this wasn’t just an isolated issue.
But there are different ways that the different cases are happening.
In Sanders’s case, the call did result from the league sending out a list of numbers of 39 players who’d be participating in the draft TV show on NFL Network and ESPN—15 of whom would be in Green Bay, and the other 24 coming on remotely. That list went to the waiver wire list, and it’s up to teams to determine who gets the daily waiver report. It’s not unusual for a team to have a fairly large group of coaches and personnel folks getting the waivers, because it’s relevant to a lot of people’s jobs.
Anyway, some of the other prank calls happened to players who weren’t on that list and, of course, there are plenty of ways for numbers to get circulated. So as much as the NFL looks into this, and they’re still digging into and investigating all these cases, there’s always going to be an element they can’t control as long as they do things this way.
That’s why I’d expect teams and the league to continue to discuss other ways to do draft calls going forward. And that’s not because, again, we’re talking about capital crimes here. More so, as I see it anyway, it’d be to save everyone this unnecessary aggravation.
Quick-hitters
We’ve got quick-hitters. Let’s dive into them …
• Hoping that Jeff Sperbeck’s family can find some peace in his memory. The longtime NFL agent and businessman died last week from injuries suffered falling off a golf cart. He was 62. His friend, John Elway, was also in the cart.
• The retirement of New York Jets QB Jordan Travis is another reminder of how fleeting the game can be. Travis suffered a gruesome broken leg two Novembers ago, near the end of his senior season at Florida State. He slipped to the fifth round of the draft in 2024, in part as a result of the injury, and recently got advice from doctors, based on the pace of the healing, to give up football. By all accounts, Travis is a great guy with a great head on his shoulders, and here’s wishing him luck in whatever he chooses to do next.
• I was a little surprised Elijah Moore was still available after the draft, so I think it was shrewd for the Buffalo Bills to take a flier on the former Browns and Jets slot receiver. Competition for roster spots at receiver in Buffalo’s training camp should be fierce.
• A lot of people around the NFL liked the Patriots landing Washington State WR Kyle Williams in the third round. One interesting comp I got for him: Tyler Lockett.
• One irony in Quinn Ewers’s situation: Agent Ron Slavin said in Todd Archer’s excellent story on Ewers’s predraft process that teams told him “he was a third- or fourth-round pick, but too big of a name to be a clipboard holder.” And yet, he had to deal with having an even bigger name, in Arch Manning, being his “clipboard holder” in Austin. Anyway, I think Ewers will take some benefit from having to go through all this. He’s a good kid and a good player.
• Gotta say, I think I’m with Lawrence Taylor. Numbers are retired for a reason. And I think asking a player who’s that great to unretire his number, or asking his family if he’s passed on, puts the player or his family in a pretty bad situation, where they know saying no makes them look selfish. So I’m glad that Taylor stood his ground—mostly because it’ll give other guys who are proud of their accomplishment a little more cover to do the same.
• The easiest way to look at George Kittle’s extension in San Francisco is that the team basically gets control for another five years, and Kittle gets the assurance he’ll be on the roster at a top-of-market rate in 2026. He was under contract for $15 million this year. He’s now assured of making $33 million over the next two.
• I love J.J. McCarthy’s confidence: “I know I’m ready to start.” Looking forward to seeing the Minnesota Vikings a little later this month to check it out for myself.
• On Jalen Ramsey, I’m really, really intrigued by the possibility he converts to safety in the next year or two. I think he could be another Charles Woodson or Rod Woodson in that regard, where the switch extends his career into his mid-30s.
• Finally, happy trails to Gregg Popovich, who stepped down as San Antonio Spurs coach last week. NFL teams have long been fascinated with San Antonio’s operation, and spent time with both longtime Spurs executive R.C. Buford and Popovich to try to learn from them. And that shows that, in the NFL folks’ minds, the Spurs’ success was about way more than winning three NBA draft lotteries (1987, ’97, 2023). Those football people saw a team that was innovative in digging talent out of places others weren’t looking, committed to building a real program and system, and excellent in player development—all of which is a tribute to Popovich.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as NFL Takeaways: Pump the Brakes on Arch Manning’s 2026 Draft Hype.