Are We Exiting the NFL Draft's Spin Season or Arriving at the Craziest Part?

Maybe Kyler Murray isn't going No. 1? So is Nick Bosa? Or Quinnen Williams? And who is visiting where? Sorting through the smoke of draft season...

Brett Deering/Getty Images

Depending on who you believe, we are either entering or leaving the pre-draft spin zone. Consider the groundswell of information we’ve received from reliable sources of late, all of which rages against the conventional wisdom we’ve all accepted over the past three months.

• There is a growing contingent of football minds who believe that Kyler Murray may not actually be the No. 1 pick after all (or, at least, they are broaching the subject a mere eight days away from the draft).

• And if Murray is not the No. 1 overall pick, there are some, including our own Albert Breer, reporting that Quinnen Williams may actually be the choice over Nick Bosa.

• And looming over all of this is the fact that the pre-draft visit tea leaves are going haywire. Dwayne Haskins to the Giants. Kyler Murray to the Giants.  Drew Lock to the Packers. Williams to the Jets. Murray to the Raiders. Bosa to the Raiders.

While pre-draft visits are notoriously overrated and largely meaningless, they do represent the hunt for information as we hit the final stretch. We’re left to wonder if this push for intel is simply normal due diligence, or, as Daniel Jeremiah wondered on Monday, if something happened recently to motivate teams into doing more of it.

Was the conventional wisdom wrong, or did it just become too conventional, leaving teams to try and upend the system to scatter the board in their favor? Former Ravens head coach Brian Billick once told me that legendary GM Ozzie Newsome used to direct everyone working under him to gather all the information they could form outside sources, but “don’t you dare give any of it away.” Maybe that’s just what we’re feeling right now: So much misinformation exchanged for real information, that the whole economy of pre-draft nuggets have been scrambled.

The fact that Arizona may or may not have been spending the last three months hyping Murray in order to generate a small mound of draft picks via trade for the new Kliff Kingsbury regime is the cherry atop all of it. The draft as we know it could be sitting atop a throne of lies.

That, or, it may just end up going the way we all thought it might.

*Breathes deeply into a paper bag*

Little more than a week to go!

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A wagyu Big Mac, courtesy of Sam The Cooking Guy.

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