Draft rumors move quickly in the final weeks leading up to Day 1 of the big event. Just five days ago, Texas Tech edge rusher David Bailey became the betting favorite to land with the Jets at the No. 2 overall pick. Just this evening, Connor Hughes of SportsNet New York reported that the team had canceled a top 30 visit that Bailey was supposed to attend.
There’s a lot of unspoken context here that’s worth mentioning. Charean Williams of Pro Football Talk commented that “it is unclear when Bailey was scheduled to visit,” confirming that, if a top 30 visit with the Jets had been announced for Bailey, it hadn’t been widely reported. Considering, as well, that today was the final possible day teams could host prospects for top 30 visits, just after 5pm on the final day seems an odd time for this information to break. It just as easily could’ve been reported that they ran out of time to get in a visit with Bailey, or it could’ve gone unreported and unnoticed altogether.
As Ryan Dunleavy of New York Post Sports suggests, the meaning of this report could taken in very different ways. The most obvious meaning would be that the Jets don’t intend to draft Bailey and chose not to waste his time with a visit. It could also mean the exact opposite: that the Jets know all they need to know about the Red Raider pass rusher, and they don’t need an additional visit to feel secure in drafting him. Dunleavy points out that, because the Jets have the No. 2 overall pick and the top overall pick is all but written in stone, there isn’t much potential benefit to throwing up this smokescreen.
One thing such a smokescreen could instigate to potentially benefit the Jets is trade interest. There may be teams interested in trading up for a top pass rusher, and they may not want to settle for whoever isn’t taken between Bailey and Ohio State’s Arvell Reese. We’ve seen rumors that the Cardinals, Giants, and other teams in the top 10 have shown interest in trading down, and perhaps the Jets wanted to get their phones ringing, too, to see what might be available to them.
The headline caused a bit of a stir this evening, but it remains to be seen if it will affect the current betting lines associated with each pick and player. Regardless, the intent should become much more clear eight days from now, when a selection is announced for the No. 2 overall pick.
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