The Denver Broncos entered the NFL Draft with a hole at wide receiver. They wasted no time addressing the issue, taking Alabama's Jerry Jeudy and Penn State's KJ Hamler with each of their first two picks last week.
During an appearance on The Rich Eisen Show, Broncos general manager John Elway explained his decision to use back-to-back draft picks on wide outs (via Nicki Jhabvala of The Athletic):
“Not knowing how the first round was going to go, I was still prepared to go receiver-receiver, and I know that it helped us going receiver-receiver because of the fact that if we hadn't gone receiver in the first round, I think there would've been a lot of people that would've tried to jump us in the second round.”
Elway's explanation certainly makes sense. If Denver didn't go receiver right off the bat, teams would have predicted the Broncos to go with a wideout in the second round and may have attempted to trade up ahead of them to beat them to the punch.
Instead, Elway got the job done right away, trading up to No. 15 to select Jeudy and then catching a lot of people off guard by going with Hamler at No. 46.
“There were a lot of people behind us that kind of let us know that Hamler was their guy. But with us sitting there, not going up as well as having drafted a wide receiver in the first round, I think people were fine sitting there thinking that we weren't going to draft another receiver.”
Jeudy and Hamler will join a receiving corps headed by Courtland Sutton, who had a breakout campaign in 2019.
With those three receivers plus tight end Noah Fant, young quarterback Drew Lock certainly has a better array of options heading into next season.
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