Some people make the mistake of thinking that the draft is about football. I can't really blame them – you'd think the NFL Draft is, in fact, about the NFL – but unfortunately, they're wrong. The draft isn't about football, the draft is about drama. The league turned it into a three-day, primetime event for a reason.
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So, if everyone's dead-set on treating the draft like this season's must-see TV event, I want it to behave like this season's must-see TV event. That means I want fireworks – actually, no, I need them. There needs to be drama, and twists, and a healthy amount of exposition that doesn't bog down the pace but keeps us all interested. If you're going to be a TV show, actually be one.
A major ingredient in that drama is The Act of Trading Up. Nothing's more exciting than trading up. It rules in every way. For those 15 minutes, the world is your oyster. Is it a smart long-term strategy for team building? Who cares. There are 1,000 downloadable PDFs from random draft twitter accounts that can answer that question for you.
And for a few weeks there, the Bears were going to trade up. Remember how great that was? They were never specifically mentioned by name, but if you read the tea leaves, you could see the Bears' fingerprints all over those anonymous reports. Bad news, though: that dream is dead. Don't blame me, blame Bears insider Brad Biggs (and, you know, don't actually blame him). While speaking to Chicago local radio station 670 The Score on Wednesday, Biggs' latest team intel was a big ol' bummer.
Bears probably aren't going to trade up in 2025 NFL Draft, according to Brad Biggs
"If they trade down, you're not getting an extra second round pick unless you move down a long ways," he said. "You'd have to drop down quite a bit. But you are getting another dart to throw at the board. If you've got a really big group of players graded at ten, sure, consider it. The other thing is, who's going to want to trade up? I think there's going to be movement, I really do. And that's driven by need. When you see these moves happen, when teams are on the clock, that's generally driven by need. So we'll have to see. I don't think they trade up. If the strength of this draft is into round two, than what are you doing? The Bears aren't so loaded right now as a roster that they just need that one guy. They need to take a shot on a bunch of guys here, as many as they can."
It sounds like he's saying there's still a chance? That's what I chose to take away from his answer. It probably won't happen, but it might, is what he's saying? I simply refuse to accept that the dream is dead, and that the draft is just going to go exactly as planned. If we're going to pretend to care about this thing for six months, the least it can do in return is deliver. So I'm going to pretend a trade up is still in play, and I invite you to do the same. Nothing bad's ever happened from setting unrealistically high expectations.