Bill Belichick will be working in the media, rather than for a team, during next week’s NFL draft. But he doesn’t think the media can be trusted to accurately report on players’ draft stock.
That’s because Belichick says it’s agents, not teams, who are talking to reporters about where players might go in the draft. And agents aren’t exactly unbiased.
“The biggest newsmakers here, quietly, are the agents,” Belichick said on the Pat McAfee Show. “Nobody wants their player to get picked higher than them, so a lot of the information that comes to the media about who’s going to draft who, how high they’re going to go, is a lot of media driven, so when the agent hears, ‘My player could go anywhere from the second or the third round,’ you add one to that and say, ‘These GMs are talking about taking my guy in the first round.’ I’ve never told an agent, ‘We’re going to take your guy in this round, we’re going to take your guy with the 27th pick or the 31st pick or whatever pick we have.’ I don’t think there’s too many teams that do that, but I think the agent’s going to say, ‘My guy is going to go at 31 to this team, my guy is going to go 17 to this team,’ and that just generates interest in the player.”
Belichick acknowledged that teams do sometimes leak information, but he says that usually happens after the final draft preparations have been made, very late in the process.
“There is information that can leak out of the organizations to give insight about what a team is going to do,” he said. “I think it’s a little early for that, but when you get into the last 12 or less hours before the draft, sometimes that information can be very, very accurate and helpful.”
Belichick will co-host a draft show with McAfee next week, Belichick’s first time talking about the draft rather than participating in it.
