Saints choosing quality over quantity in draft makes sense

The New Orleans Saints entered the NFL Draft with five picks and came out of it with four players.

Along the way they sent a third-round pick in next year’s draft to the Cleveland Browns and a sixth-round pick next year to the Houston Texans.

Mathematically it doesn’t add up, but football wise it makes sense. This draft, like a lot of drafts, is about quality more than quantity.

Occasionally organizations will wind up with a lot of picks and come away with a bunch of promising players; see the Saints 1986 and 2006 drafts as examples. But more often they’ll have five to eight picks and hope to come away with three or so good players.

The Saints obviously have little margin for error in that regard. They likely have to hit on each of the top three players in order to come away with three good ones – center Cesar Ruiz (first round), linebacker Zach Baun (third round) and tight end Adam Trautman (third round). Any productivity they get from quarterback Tommy Stevens (seventh round) would be lagniappe.

There are very good reasons for thinking the top three players not only will make the roster but also will contribute right away and quite possibly be significant contributors for many seasons.

Ruiz was generally considered the top interior lineman in the draft, Baun was considered a borderline first-round pick by some analysts and Trautman was considered good value in the third round as well.

“That’s three players that we had in our top 40,” Executive Vice President/General Manager Mickey Loomis said. “I think in a lot of ways it couldn’t have worked out any better.”

Head coach Sean Payton said he expects Ruiz to start, presumably alongside last year’s top pick, Erik McCoy, with one of them moving to guard. Payton said after the first round Thursday night that linebacker would be a priority going forward, and getting a tight end helps make up for the Saints not getting a wide receiver.

“We were able to identify and fill some needs without reaching,” Payton said.

The Saints traded up 14 spots in the third round to grab Baun at pick No. 74 overall.

“We saw someone that we felt was going to be drafted in the top 20 picks of the second round,” Payton said of Baun, a consensus first-team All-American as a senior last year. “We felt like this was a player that would be hard for us to get because we didn’t have a second-round pick.”

The Saints started making phone calls at the start of the second round to try and get in position to take Baun, but they weren’t willing to pay the price to get that high. But Baun kept falling and eventually the cost to trade up with Cleveland and Baun’s value intersected.

A similar intersection when the Saints moved back into the bottom of the third round at No. 105 to get in position to select Trautman. Loomis said the Saints were prepared to pay more than the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh round picks that they shipped to get Trautman.

“Two things happened (in the third round),” Payton said. “We hit on a couple of need positions and we felt that where we had these guys graded, it really matched.”

Trautman played quarterback and also played basketball at a small high school in Ohio. Dayton was the only non-Ivy League school that pursued him.

“For someone who played at a smaller level, you see a dominant player,” Payton said.

New Orleans entered the final day of the draft Saturday with no picks in the final four rounds, but as the final round wound down, they acquired the 240th pick from Houston to select Mississippi State quarterback Tommy Stevens, who will be tried at a variety of positions a la Taysom Hill while being developed as a quarterback.

But he seems unlikely to have a significant impact right away. The other three, though, seem likely to do so even on a three-time defending division champion with legitimate Super Bowl aspirations.

“Sometimes there’s a little bit of a downer when you only have three players,” Loomis said. “I feel like we’ve added three high-quality players, high-character, intelligent guys who are going to fit with our roster perfectly.

“It is difficult to make our roster and so I think for us it is more about quality over quantity.”