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It seems that every year a player emerges from the draft explaining that a team had claimed it would draft him in a certain spot and did not.
This year, one such player is Vikings safety Lewis Cine. Via SI.com, Cine recently told Richard Sherman that an unnamed team holding the twenty-seventh overall pick (iethe Buccaneers) has repeatedly said they’d take him if he was there.
He was. The Bucs didn’t take him.
“I had a team at twenty-seven,” Cine said. “They know who they are. I ain’t gonna’ say no names. It was at twenty-seven. The whole process — if you’re there — we’re gonna pick you. They move down to the first pick of the second round. I’m like, damn, they did me just so dirty.”
The Buccaneers may have made the calculation that Cine would still be there at No. 33. But for the Vikings taking him at No. 32, he would have been.
“We had a few players at 27 that we targeted,” coach Todd Bowles said on the second night of the draft. “Moving back to 33, which was the first [pick] today, we had one guy left there. The other ones went off the board, so it wouldn’t have been smart for us to trade back down and lose the guy we wanted.”
Obviously, that doesn’t mesh with Cine’s contention. But let’s be realistic. Bowles was never going to admit, even if it were 100-percent true, that they wanted Cine, they traded down and gambled on Cine still being there, and they lost the gamble so they settled for defensive end Logan Hall.