The 2019 NFL Draft took place on Thursday, April 25th in front of a huge Nashville crowd 600,000 people strong. The draft began with a lucky fan winning 100 years of season tickets to their favorite teams games, this was done to celebrate the 100th year of the NFL’s existence. Gregory R. Hampton was the lucky winner of two season tickets to New York Giants for many years to come. After he accepted his award Commissioner Roger Goodell came to the podium and announced that the Arizona Cardinals were now on the clock, the draft had officially begun.
For a long time the Cardinals were expected to take Kyler Murray the 5’10 scrambler quarterback out of Oklahoma, who was also taken with the 9th pick in the Major League Baseball draft and was offered a huge contract by the team that drafted him, the Oakland Athletics, but he chose to play football instead. Murray fit well with the Cardinals. The Cards new head coach Kliff Kingsbury who last was coaching Texas Tech said that if he had the number 1 pick in the draft he would take Kyler Murray and, now that he had the chance to, he did. The controversy with this pick though, other than his height and baseball, was the other first round quarterback on the Cards roster, Josh Rosen, who just one year earlier had been picked with 10th overall pick in the draft, a pick which the Cardinals traded up to get. As soon as they made the Murray pick, Rosen was expected to be traded to another team.
The next two picks came and went without much intrigue, as for almost the entire time leading up to the draft experts had Nick Bosa, the defensive end out of Ohio state, going to the 49ers and Quinnen Williams, the defensive tackle out of Alabama, going to the Jets 3rd overall. As expected that was who they both picked, and then the first real surprise came at the number 4 spot with the Oakland Raiders taking defensive end Clelin Ferrell, who many expected to be picked in the late first round. However, this was much less surprising than one of the upcoming picks because with the 6th overall pick the New York Giants took Duke quarterback Daniel Jones. The Giants had a lot of options with this pick, they could have taken Ohio State QB Dwayne Haskins, who ended up falling all the way down to pick #15 and being taken by the Redskins, Or they could have taken Josh Allen, the edge rusher coming out of Kentucky, who most considered to be the best available at this point. But instead they ended up going with the biggest surprise of the draft, Jones.
As for the Eagles’ picks, with the 22nd pick they took the replacement to aging offensive tackle Jason Peters with Andre Dillard, a tackle out of Washington State who many expect to be an instant starter and could become a great player for the Eagles. The Eagles had two picks in the second round and with those picks they chose Miles Sanders, the Penn State running back and Stanford wide receiver Jose Arcega-Whiteside.
by Theo Schenck ’24