The Denver Broncos search for a franchise QB seems like it won’t involve a trade up from their spot at number 12.
“You’d say, man, it sure looks like we have to draft a quarterback, and yet, it’s got to be the right fit, the right one,” head coach Sean Payton said. “And if you had the tip sheets as to who everyone else was taking, it would be easier to answer that question. … That’s the puzzle here.”
Broncos have played weird QB game
“What you don’t want to do is force it,” General Manager George Paton said. “Otherwise we’ll be in this position next year and the years after. You want to get the right player at 12. Our first pick we’ve got to hit on, whether it’s a quarterback, whether it’s a tackle, a receiver, you name it, we need to get an impact player.”
“One thing we know, we’re going to get a really good player at 12,” Paton added. “We’ve had teams call to move up, we’ve had teams call to move back, we have flexibility. But we do know at 12, if we stand pat, we’ll get a really good player.”
“I do think it is a good quarterback class. There is seven to eight quarterbacks that we like, who we think can play in the league someday,” Paton said. “… But it is a good quarterback class. It’s been fun getting to know them, seven or eight of them. We think we can get a quarterback early. We think we can get one mid-rounds. We think there’s going to be quarterbacks throughout the draft who are interesting to us.”
“There’s a handful of teams ahead of us where you would say quarterback [is a need],” Payton said. “Then there’s a team or two — Minnesota, ourselves, the Raiders — you could argue quarterback. That’s what makes this year a little interesting.”
The Broncos are currently heading into the Draft with Jarrett Stidham as their starting QB. While it’s not unthinkable that they could go with Stidham for the 2024 season, being in a position to take one of the top 4/5 QB’s and passing would seem a very odd choice.
But the Broncos also managed to talk themselves out of getting any value at all for veteran QB Russell Wilson, while eating an NFL record dead-cap hit.
It remains to be seen whether the Broncos will actually stand pat, or if this is solely a tactic to try and lower the price of trading up.
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