Trading up to the No. 1 pick of the NFL draft isn't ever easy, but doing so with new Tennessee Titans general manager Jon Robinson sounds especially daunting.
Robinson told a gathering of Titans fans Saturday that a trade to move back too far would require a "king's ransom" in compensation. NFL Media analysts Daniel Jeremiah and Lance Zierlein project the Titans to select Ole Miss left tackle Laremy Tunsil with the top pick, a move that could precipitate a switch to right tackle for the club's 2014 first-rounder, Taylor Lewan.
"There is a group of players that are at the top of the draft, that, you don't want to move back too far cause you can miss out on one of those guys, and if you do move back that far you want to make sure that you have a king's ransom, for lack of a better term, to move that far," Robinson said, according to ESPN. "I would say that for us to move out of that pick, it's going to take a substantial amount of picks to do that."
A team looking to move into the No. 1 pick, if not for Tunsil, could be determined to take a quarterback ahead of the Cleveland Browns, who hold the No. 2 pick and have a glaring need at the quarterback position.
Only Robinson knows, of course, how a king's ransom would be defined. Although Robinson wasn't the Titans GM at the time, the club reportedly turned down the Philadelphia Eagles for the No. 2 overall pick last year despite an offer of two first-round picks, a second-round pick, and two players, according to Fox Sports. Tennessee instead held onto the pick and chose quarterback Marcus Mariota, who showed promise as a rookie in the face of a leaky pass protection.
It's that leaky pass protection, and the team's investment in Mariota, that has helped drive speculation that the club is targeting Tunsil.
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