Some people seem to believe that it was a major reach for the Tennessee Titans to draft T’Vindre Sweat with the 38th overall pick on the 2024 NFL Draft.
I’ve seen all the posts. Armchair GMs using pre-draft big board rankings from their favorite draft analyst or content creator to criticize Ran Carthon and the Titans front office. It’s all nonsense.
Let’s just pretend for a moment that mock drafts and online big boards were an accurate way to evaluate a draft pick (spoiler, they’re not)…Sweat’s ranking, which was often in the 100s, was greatly influenced by his DWI arrest.
Prior to the arrest, the Athletic’s Dane Brugler has Sweat ranked 33rd on his big board. NFL.com’s Eric Edholm had Sweat ranked 38th. There are countless other examples.
Am I supposed to believe that every analyst and scout fell out of love with Sweat’s game in the two weeks leading up to the draft without cause? No, it was the DWI and “character issues” that pushed Sweat down most boards. Those “characters issues” are not a cocker for the Titans at all. Other NFL front offices feel the same way.
Titans GM Ran Carthon appeared on 104.5 The Zone’s “Ramon, Kayla, & Will” on Monday morning. During the interview, Carthon talked about some of the texts he received from other front offices after the Titans took Sweat off the board at 38.
It’s pretty clear that other NFL teams had Sweat ranked highly and the Titans would not have been able to get him had they traded down.
"I promise that in everything we do, we're well researched. What people don't see is the text messages and calls you get from teams after you take 'their guy' and how many texts and calls were 'We were taking him with our next pick' or 'Great pick,'" Carthon said in regards to selecting Sweat 38th overall.
"I had earmarked on the board of 'This is the furthest we could go back and still get a guy of this caliber.' And even with that, one of the teams that I earmarked that we could go below to get him texted and said after the draft 'We would have taken him if he was there.' So we would have missed out."
By the sound of things, there was a lot of demand for Sweat in the second round of the draft. Again, before the DWI he was a slam dunk second round talent with first round upside. I'd imagine there were a number of NFL front offices that still had him around there on their board.
The Titans got their guy by holding on to pick 38. I couldn't be more optimistic about Sweat's future with the organization playing alongside Jeffery Simmons.
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