Chris Landry is one of the smartest minds in football. That’s a fact. And his forte is with scouting, talent evaluation and assisting teams to get the best bang for their buck when signing athletes.
Out of all the Kyler Murray mania we have been discussing this week, Landry's statements about what the Cardinals may truly be doing at team headquarters were fascinating. Sure, the general storylines out there are things such as ’the team is shopping Josh Rosen’ but ‘the team is not actively shopping Josh Rosen’ or ’the team has no idea what they will do with their #1 pick’ or ‘Kyler Murray is a done deal to the Arizona Cardinals,’ etc, etc. But Chris Landry has cleared the nonsense and he has let it slip what the realities of Cardinals headquarters just may be.
The Murray conversation starts around the 2:45 mark in this interview, when after the question, Chris Landry responded by how he didn’t think that signing Kyler Murray was truly a done deal, EVEN IF it was indeed what the Cardinals wanted to eventually do. He went on to say that there is so much more to the overall process and how the Cardinals in particular may have another hurdle to clear… baseball.
Listen for the full interview context, but this was interesting indeed:
“You gotta cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s… once you do that, this is something that people may not be as aware of, once they decide, IF they decide that Kyler Murray is their guy (or anyone else for that matter)… they can begin negotiating with him like today… you can do a deal today with him. You don’t have to wait until the draft... So my advice would be, is if they come to that decision and that's who they want, they would get him nailed to a contract… that option of baseball is always out there… and before I’m makin a trade with my current quarterback, I’m makin sure that I've got this guy in full... That would be the approach I would take if that’s what they want to do.
“I will say this, that it’s tough to get really comfortable with their decision making process… when you make a decision “Steve Wilks’ our guy… Josh Rosen’s our quarterback and we’re good to go, and then twelve months later... you are scrappin both of those plans… and you hire a first time head coach in the NFL, a guy that’s been an adequate head coach in college, and this is your answer… it may work, I hope it works, but boy, what a risk it is!”
"I think they need to get moving on it… I would encourage them to do one if it’s with Murray b/c of the fact that it would kind of reduce that leverage that he has over you, as he always has that option… to go back to baseball… I’d wanna close that door before I’d think about where I'm gonna move Josh Rosen and what I’m gonna get for him.
"… and then what if they only get a 3rd round pick for Rosen? That will look like egg on their face big time in terms of their decision making… if it doesn’t work, it’s probably gonna cost everybody their jobs. If it does work, all will be forgiven. You know how that is.”