2024 SB Nation Mock Draft: How I learned to stop worrying and trade up for J.J. McCarthy

Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is a war room!

UPDATE: The post for our actual selection will be going up tomorrow morning. I mistakenly thought it was going up this morning. The rest of the post explaining the process of trading up is still accurate.

In an attempt to handle the 2024 SB Nation NFL Mock Draft the way I think the Minnesota Vikings might try to handle it, I determined that I was not going to come out of things without a top prospect at the quarterback position. Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and the Vikings’ front office have made it clear. . .at least, from my interpretation. . .that they’re going to position themselves to get the player that they feel they can hitch their wagons to for the long term.

I mean, after all, if they don’t get this one right, Adofo-Mensah and Kevin O’Connell aren’t really going to have much of a “long term” in Minnesota, because the next quarterback decision will be made by someone else in that case.

While the leads for the various SB Nation NFL sites were making their preparations for this mock, the Bears made it clear that the #1 overall pick wasn’t up for grabs. Not that they’d trade it to the Vikings anyway, but it clarified that Caleb Williams wasn’t going to be an option for us. So, I set my sights on moving up to one of the next three selections, held by Washington, New England, and Arizona. There was no point in trying to get up to #5, because that leaves you vulnerable to having someone like Denver or Las Vegas leapfrog you into the #4 spot, and then what do you do?

In the interest of full disclosure, in that scenario, I absolutely would have taken Marvin Harrison Jr., if for no other reason than the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments that would have resulted. Hey, if you’re going to screw up my draft, I’m happy to return the favor.

So, I proposed trade offers to the virtual GMs of those three teams. I was attempting to use the Rich Hill trade chart as a guide, and as a result the package I sent to Washington was significantly larger than the offers I sent to the other two teams. I had included the Vikings’ 2025 first-round pick in the proposal to Washington but did not initially include it in the offers to New England or Arizona, substituting a 2025 third-round pick instead.

Despite what I had offered, Washington turned the deal down and let me know they were intent on taking Drake Maye, who did go at #2. The other two GMs said that they would need more, at which point I asked both of them if adding the 2025 first-round pick would be enough or, if not, exactly what they would require to get the deal done.

New England said that they couldn’t take that deal and wound up selecting Jayden Daniels at #3. I sort of think my odds of getting up to #3 would have been better had the Commanders taken Daniels instead of Maye, but that’s not how it went. Again, full disclosure, Daniels was my primary target all along because I think he’s the most dynamic playmaker in this draft, but without getting into the top 3 it wasn’t going to happen.

Arizona, on the other hand, was open to the idea of trading down from #4 to #11 for the collection of picks that I ultimately wound up sending them. As I said in the article about the pick we made that went up a little over an hour ago, I acknowledge that this sounds like a significant price, but it’s only really a significant price if it winds up not working out. I think the Vikings are willing to take this swing in this draft given everything they’ve done leading up to this point, so I went ahead and made the deal official.

The deal wound up being the Vikings sending #11, #23, and a 2025 first-round pick to Arizona for #4 overall.

This process illustrates at least one of the things that we’ve said about trading up throughout this process. It doesn’t matter how badly you want to trade up. . .it requires having someone willing to trade down to make that happen. In this case, both Washington and New England had players that they believed in and wanted to take at #2 and #3, respectively, and with that being the case there really wasn’t much that I could do about it.

While I said earlier that Daniels was my primary target, McCarthy was always the backup plan for me in this scenario. He’s always been the most realistic target at #4, given the way the top three quarterbacks have sort of established themselves thus far, but McCarthy has significant enough athletic ability and upside where there’s every reason to believe that he could be the long-term quarterback for the Vikings.

So, efforts were made to get one of the top quarterbacks in the 2024 NFL Draft in our mock this year and, ultimately, those efforts were successful. I don’t know if this is how things will play out on Draft Night, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it were to happen something like this.