Jalen Milroe doesn’t want to discuss Michigan’s sign-stealing scandal from the 2023 season. Alabama’s quarterback was asked if he believed the Wolverines cheated and demurred, brushing the questions off and crediting them for winning the national championship. It was a textbook lesson in how to avoid making waves during an interview.
On Tuesday, Milroe was a guest on Barstool Sports’ Bussin’ With the Boys and was asked if he thought Michigan cheated. His replied, “Doesn’t matter, they won.”
That is an incredibly savvy, well-handled response from Milroe. It’s impressive.
Milroe led Alabama against Michigan in the semifinal of the College Football Playoffs. The sophomore famously came up just two yards short of tying the game in overtime, as Michigan stopped his quarterback sneak shy of the goal line. That gave the Wolverines a 27-20 win and a berth in the title game, where they trounced Washington 34-13.
Overall, Milroe performed well in his first year as the Crimson Tide’s starter in 2023. He completed 65.8% of his passes for 2,834 yards, with 23 touchdowns, six interceptions, a passer rating of 172.2 and 531 yards and 12 touchdowns on the ground. His QBR of 80.5 ranked 13th nationally, and he earned second team All-SEC honors.
Milroe is returning under a new head coach in 2024, as Kalen DeBoer has taken over for Nick Saban. It will be fascinating how things change with a new staff and a new offense. Milroe has the inside track to start, but it’s already clear he can handle the media responsibilities of a starting quarterback at Alabama.
Five years ago, in âThe Art of Coachingâ documentary that highlighted the bond between Bill Belichick and Nick Saban, the then-Alabama coach ripped off a rant on NFL teams, and how they handled evaluating his players ahead of the draft.
âOne thing that you do, that a lot of the NFL guys donât do, I donât know that youâve ever picked one of our guys if you never talked to me before picking him,â Saban said to Belichick. âAnd thereâs a few other guys in the league that do that. But then thereâs another 30 teams that I never hear from, and then they pick somebody and Iâm saying, âThey picked that guy?â And then they say, âWell, we didnât know this.â Well, all you had to do is call and I would have told you the good stuff and I wouldâve told you any issue.â
Count the Detroit Lions as a team that listens to Saban.
Two consecutive years, theyâve come away from the NFL draft with the guy NFL folks had tabbed as the legendary coachâs favorite in the class. Last year, it was Brian Branch, who became an integral part of the Detroit defense, and a Swiss Army knife for defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn. This year, itâs Terrion Arnold, a corner the Lions never thought would be there in the 20s.
Detroit had actually laid groundwork for a trade upâI believe Missouri DE Darius Robinson was the targetâwhich made it easy to pivot and get aggressive in going up from No. 29 to No. 24 to land a falling Arnold.
For his part, Saban loved how Arnold took hard coaching, and attacked the challenge the coaches put in front of him, in sticking with him at corner rather than projecting him to safety like other schools had in recruiting him. Also, Detroit took note of how Saban played him at the âstarâ position (nickel corner), as well as outside corner. As the Lions see it, being deployed as the star at Alabama is a huge sign of trust and respect from Saban, because of the mental and physical burden he puts on that spot, and the versatility he demands from it.
Branch, for what itâs worth, played a lot there, too.
In this case, it wasnât like it had been the year before, where GM Brad Holmes personally connected with Saban (theyâd talked about Branch and Jahmyr Gibbs last year). But Detroit did have a couple of high-level staffers get to Saban on Arnold, confirming what theyâd seen. Which, in the end, made going after Arnold a no-brainer when he slipped.
⢠There are a lot of stories where a fortunate twist can play into a team drafting a certain playerâand the Chargers will have one of those from 2024 if, years from now, OT Joe Alt becomes the sort of franchise cornerstone Joe Hortiz and Jim Harbaugh think he can be.
The fact that the GM and coach were new did limit, to a degree, what they were personally able to do during this draft cycle. But the Chargers were able to get guys out on the road enough, both on the coaching and scouting side. And one such lieutenant that traveled around was veteran line coach Mike Devlin.
As luck would have it, he was assigned to run drills for the offensive line prospects at Notre Dameâs pro day in March. That allowed Devlin to challenge Alt, and to also get to know him better with the extra time heâd get with the Irish captain. Now, itâs not like there were too many revelations on the visit. Everyone knew what sort of player he was. But with the Chargers also liking Alabama RT JC Latham, the little things did make a difference.
The biggest question now is where Alt will fit on the line. All 33 of his starts at Notre Dame came at left tackle, the position Rashawn Slater plays for the Chargers. The plan is to let Alt compete for the starting right tackle spot. That said, he played tight end in high school, and wound up starting at left tackle as a true freshman at Notre Dame. So the lift might not be as heavy for Alt as it would be for others.
And thatâs what made this pick so easy for the Chargers. Alt will figure it out, and at a baseline be a really good pro with a chance to be much better, making him the rare high floor-high ceiling prospect. He has some stuff to work on such as his ability to anchor (though the Chargers would tell you to watch how, in those spots, he bends and recovers). But with the presence and intelligence he showed the Chargers in meetings, itâs a good bet that Alt will keep ascending.
⢠The Chiefs did right by Travis Kelce, giving the future Hall of Famer what amounts to a plain-old raise Mondayâusually teams will require adding years to a playerâs contract in exchange, or moving money away from a future year, for giving them this sort of pay bump.
Kelceâs existing contract had a $12 million base salary for this year, with another $750,000 in per-game roster bonuses, and a $250,000 roster bonus. The Chiefs gave him another $4 million, guaranteeing all $17 million for 2023. They left his $17.25 million for 2025 intact, added a trigger thatâll guarantee most of it in March (in the form of an $11.5 million roster bonus due on the third day of the league year), and force the team to make a decision on whether to keep him at the start of free agency.
The two-year deal makes Kelce the highest paid tight end in the NFL heading into a season in which heâll turn 35. Itâs also, truth be told, not that big of a number. Heâs making less, in fact, on an APY (average per year) basis than Cleveland Browns WR Jerry Jeudy. Which is to say everything is relative, and in that sense a great tight end is a much better deal in todayâs NFL than is a good receiver.
⢠As happy as the Minnesota Vikings were to get J.J. McCarthy where they did with the 10th pick, Iâd say they were more surprised that pass rusher Dallas Turner slipped as deep into the teens as he did, which prompted the reaction from Kevin OâConnell that the teamâs in-house crew captured.
In the end, they got two guys who were projected in the top 10 in a series of trade-ups without giving up an additional first-round pick to do it. The downside? It comes in volume. They wound up with seven picks after coming in with nine, and none of those picks came on Day 2 (they had one pick between 17 and 177, and that was at 108). As it stands now, they will have only four picks next yearâtheir own first-rounder, a third-round compensatory pick for Kirk Cousins, their own fifth-rounder, and another fifth-rounder they acquired in the ZaâDarius Smith trade.
⢠With the deadline Thursday, we know that nine of the top 12 picks in the 2021 draft have had their fifth-year option picked up. The three that havenât, and wonât, are all quarterbacks who have been tradedâZach Wilson, Trey Lance and Justin Fields.
The teams that took those three certainly felt the pain of the misses, but each has recovered nicely. And throw Mac Jones in there, and you have four of five first-round quarterbacks from that yearâs class dealt, without a single Day 1 or Day 2 pick included in any of the four trades.
⢠Interestingly enough, only six of the remaining 22 first-rounders from that year have had their fifth-year options picked up.
⢠Ezekiel Elliott showed last year with the New England Patriots that he can still play. That said, the Dallas Cowboys canât run him the way they did in Elliottâs previous stint. I was pretty surprised, as such, that the Cowboys didnât use one of their eight picks on the position, though they do think highly of Rico Dowdle and Deuce Vaughn.
⢠It wasnât a huge surprise that the New York Giants punted on quarterback with Drake Maye three picks before their first-round selection at No. 6âword circulated around the NFL that New York had become a Maye-or-no-QB team over the couple of weeks leading up to the draft. And since they did offer their 2025 first-rounder to get to No. 3, you can see New York saw a gap between the top three and the next three in the class.
⢠As for how the teams had the guys ranked, the Vikings really dove in on the guys after the top two, and had Maye (for whom they offered 11, 23 and a 2025 first-rounder, with pick swaps favoring them bringing some value back), then McCarthy. The Falcons had Michael Penix Jr. behind Caleb Williams and Jayden Daniels (with a few folks in their building personally having Penix second). And Denver had Nix behind only Williams and Daniels.
⢠I can appreciate the video of Colts GM Chris Ballard saying the Indianapolis Colts got the draftâs best pass rusher in Laiatu Latu. Most people, maybe all, I talked to about the UCLA star before the draft told me his tape was the best among the pass rushers. But thatâs not the question with Latu; itâs the condition of his nick. But if heâs healthy? Paired with DeForest Buckner in that front, look out.