Talent acquisition is "easier" via FA, but that certainty comes at a much higher price tag. Draft picks are always free, but squandering them puts you behind the eight ball in the "cheap talent" department... which in turn makes acquisition via FA "less easy" within the confines of a salary cap. Good teams are good at "balance" in both areas.

1st round picks are over-valued before they're ever drafted. The Rams have traded theirs away every year since 2016, including this year's and next year's... they've been in the playoffs all but one of those years with two trips to the Superbowl. They finally won a championship, ironically enough, by trading two 1st round picks and the last player they used one on (Goff) to find their QB!


And that also plays into the "bust" argument, which is directly correlated to how high the player was drafted...

"Offensive Lineman at #13", the Tyler Linderbaum thread, had me examine past drafts to see that he would be the highest drafted Center since 1976. I looked at all the 1st round picks over 30 years to see very little evidence of "generational talent" that teams usually cite when using such high assets on non-skill position players (first dead-giveaway was how many times the Browns have done it vs our track record of success). I also saw how few had even reached Pro Bowl status.

You know where all the Pro Bowl centers were found? The 3rd and 4th round. Why? Because that's the value the league places on drafting centers, pure and simple. Analytics is simple in this case, if you're drafting one higher, you're going against the grain of when and where the talent pool lies for that position.

Now, that doesn't diminish Tyler's talent, or have any bearing on whether he'll reach the esteemed tier of "generational talent". There's a damned decent chance the team that drafts him can put a check mark next to center for the next decade. If he's not all those things, and just middle of the road serviceable center... is he a bust? Most would say yes merely because of the draft asset that was used.

So there's another in the long list of variables, acquisition cost vs where the league judges draftable talent per position.