If Broncos make a draft-day trade, it probably will not have happened on the fly

The Denver Broncos might not stand pat at No. 20 in the first round. They’ll be prepared to move either way — and after a quiet pre-draft process that at the moment means that each of the 32 first-round choices belongs to its original holder, one figures that some movement must inevitably take place, as the NFL abhors a vacuum of draft wheeling and dealing.

But being ready means doing the work now.

“This week you make a lot of calls and then next week the more serious calls: ‘Hey, if this player’s here, we want to move up or what have you,'” general manager George Paton said during a press conference over Zoom on Thursday afternoon.

“So, I’ve talked to most every GM in the NFL, kind of set the table, set the plan. ‘Hey, if your player’s here, when you move up, what do you — what’s the range?’ And so, you start talking parameters.”

Then next week, it cranks up.

“I would say it gets more serious next week and then really draft day sometimes you won’t — you maybe you haven’t heard from a team and someone’s just, they really want to come up and they’re aggressive, their player’s there,” Paton said.

But it’s also a matter of knowing what a team’s philosophy is. Some are open to dealing. Some prefer standing pat. Some, as Sean Payton noted, feel they must “win” the trade; those are the clubs with whom it can be difficult to make a proper deal.

And then there are the wild cards — the teams with new people in charge.

“There’s a handful of new GMs, new head coaches. And so, how do you — how do you look at them?” Payton said.

Jacksonville, Las Vegas and the New York Jets have new general managers and head coaches. Tennessee has a new GM. Chicago, Dallas, New England and New Orleans have newcomers in the head coach’s seat — although the Patriots’ newcomer has been a head coach before.

The Jets have a former Broncos executive, Darren Mougey, as their general manager and an ex-Payton assistant coach, Aaron Glenn, as their head coach. They hold the No. 7 choice, and the Broncos ought to have a good read on what they’ll do.

It’s the Jaguars at No. 5 with first-time coach Liam Coen and general manager James Gladstone who may be the hardest to read in their intent; both are the youngest in the NFL at their positions. They sit one slot ahead of the Raiders, identified as one of the two teams — along with the Broncos — that Boise State running back Ashton Jeanty said had the heaviest contact with him.

The one thing the Broncos could do that would shake this year’s draft to its foundation would be to trade up for Jeanty, and doing so would likely require jumping in front of Las Vegas.

THE PHILOSOPHIES IN THE BRONCOS DRAFT ROOM

Sean Payton has a history of moving up on the draft’s opening night. He did so most recently in 2018, when he sacrificed a future first-round pick to advance 13 slots to the No. 14 position in order to select edge rusher Marcus Davenport.

The big swing is his thing.

“I — probably more than any other average- to below-average-handicap golfer — am guilty of hitting a driver when I should be hitting another club,” he said Thursday.

That was part of an answer to a question about his perception of the Broncos’ offseason and how close they now stand to the top of the AFC West in the wake of March free-agent signings of Dre Greenlaw, Talanoa Hufanga and Evan Engram.

But it applies to a great many things. Payton’s draft history with the Saints was about daring moves up the board and a disregard for collecting compensatory selections. The Saints were dead last in the NFL in compensatory picks during Payton’s years there and the next compensatory choice the Broncos have with Payton as head coach will be their first with him. (They are projected by Over The Cap to have two compensatory seventh-round picks next year.)

And then there’s George Paton, who espoused the “more darts” philosophy — albeit with some flexibility. The merits of that came into play in his first draft, when he turned one third-round pick into two, which provided a pair of bites at the apple in the form of Quinn Meinerz and Baron Browning.

Both became starters; one signed a massive contract extension and became a first-team All-Pro.

Two years later, the Broncos surrendered a future third-round pick to move up in Round 3 to select cornerback Riley Moss. That was Payton’s first Broncos draft.

“You don’t love giving picks up in the future,” Paton said at the time, “but we had two in the third,” he said, referring to the third round of the 2024 draft. Of course, that extra third-rounder was what the Broncos got back for surrendering their second-rounder that year as part of the trade for Payton.

Payton and Paton are yin and yang, but they work well together — in part because of their differences. They balance each other. The happy medium was where the Broncos sat last year, standing pat at No. 12, watching and waiting and smiling as the quarterback they wanted landed in their laps. A return to the playoffs, a reinvigorated franchise and heightened expectations was their reward.

Now the question is this: What will their move end up being — or will there be no move at all?