Winners and Losers of the First Round of the 2024 NFL Draft

Quarterbacks were the story of night one of the draft: Six passers were selected in the top 12 picks. Plus: a long wait for defensive players, a huge night for the Bears, and an impressive draft broadcast debut for Bill Belichick.

The first round of the NFL draft is in the books! Offense dominated the night, and six quarterbacks were drafted in the top 12 selections. Here are the winners and losers from Day 1.

Winners: The Chicago Bears … and Their Fans … and Caleb Williams … and Rome Odunze

It was impossible to name just one winner here, so I’m handing out Ws to everyone involved in the Bears’ first round. The Bears, as an organization, are obviously the big winners of the night. This franchise has never had a quarterback throw for 4,000 yards in a single season, and this fan base hasn’t had a true franchise quarterback to call its own since football games started being televised. If Williams is as good as advertised, the wait will have been worth it.

But the franchise and its fans aren’t the only winners here. Williams is also getting a pretty sweet deal. He’s walking into an offense that already featured DJ Moore and Keenan Allen at receiver, and then the team took Odunze with the ninth pick. In Braxton Jones and Darnell Wright, Williams has two young, promising offensive tackles protecting him. And he’ll be playing under Shane Waldron, one of the brightest young offensive play callers in the league. Chicago’s defense was a top-five unit in the second half of the 2023 season, per TruMedia. This is a great situation for any quarterback to be walking into.

It’s also a cushy situation for a rookie receiver, and Odunze might be the ideal fit for what this Bears receiver room needed heading into the draft. The Washington standout is an advanced route runner and a dominant ball winner on the perimeter. He’ll complement Moore’s explosive playmaking and Allen’s reliability from the slot. And paired with Williams, a creative thrower with supreme accuracy and feathery touch, Odunze will be getting service from a quarterback who can maximize his skill set. These two might set the record for back-shoulder fades thrown in a single season.

But maybe the biggest W belongs to general manager Ryan Poles, who’s been working toward this night for over a year. Poles had the foresight to trade out of the top pick last year and pick up a star receiver (Moore) in the process of dealing with Carolina. Rather than forcing a big move to land a quarterback sooner, he let Justin Fields—a quarterback he didn’t draft—play one more season in Chicago while Poles built around the team’s future signal-caller. And now that Poles has found his franchise QB, this roster is ready to support and nurture Williams in a way that we don’t typically see from teams who draft first.

There’s an alternate timeline in which the Bears held on to last year’s top pick and drafted Bryce Young. And instead of drafting Williams and Odunze, Poles would’ve spent Thursday night confronting a bar owner about signage. Take it from a Panthers fan: Chicago’s current timeline is way more enjoyable.

Loser: Everybody Involved in Atlanta’s QB Succession Plan

It’s always smart to have a long-term plan at quarterback. When your starting quarterback will be 36 this season and is coming off a major Achilles injury, you need a succession plan in place. From that perspective, it made a lot of sense for the Falcons to draft a quarterback this year. But drafting a 24-year-old quarterback who has a long track record of significant knee injuries with a top-10 pick just months after giving that 36-year-old QB a four-year, $180 million deal will require further explanation.

By the sound of it, Kirk Cousins may be joining the rest of us in our search for answers from general manager Terry Fontenot. According to multiple reports—including from NFL Network’s Daniel Jeremiah, who heard directly from Cousins’s agent—the Falcons told their new starting quarterback they’d be drafting his replacement … just before the pick was announced.

That’s one way to sour a relationship with a player before it starts. One would assume that in the process of recruiting Cousins in free agency, Atlanta sold Cousins on the idea of contending now and making moves that would help the team do that. No matter how the Falcons want to frame the Michael Penix Jr. pick, that’s not what this is. Cousins’s salary is guaranteed for the next two seasons, and if he stays healthy, Penix might not see the field until 2026—at the earliest.

Cousins isn’t the only loser here. Penix played a lot of football in school—starting 45 games over six years. So if any quarterback in this class can afford to miss out on those live reps that a quarterback can get only in games, it’s Penix. But this is a less-than-ideal start to his career. If he develops into a long-term starter, he’ll need to get more comfortable navigating pressure in a tight pocket and throwing into tight windows over the field. It’s hard to replicate those plays in practice. Even if sitting behind Cousins doesn’t derail Penix’s development, it will almost certainly slow it.

And even if you ignore the awkward dynamic at play here with Cousins, this is still a shocking pick by Atlanta. The betting odds had Penix as a borderline first-round pick, and most draft pundits agreed. Penix turns 24 in two weeks—he’s just a few months younger than former Falcons QB Desmond Ridder—and he had torn two ACLs and suffered an injury to his throwing shoulder while in college. That’s not the profile of a player who typically gets picked in the first round. I’m not sure we’ve ever seen a player like this taken in the top 10.

With the first seven picks used on offensive players, the Falcons, a team in desperate need of young defensive talent, had their entire defensive board to choose from. There were dynamic edge defenders in Dallas Turner and Laiatu Latu and lockdown cornerbacks in Quinyon Mitchell and Terrion Arnold right there. Instead, they did this. If it ever seems like the Falcons are in a good spot, just know some weird shit is about to go down.

Winner: Minnesota Vikings

We were promised trades and chaos at the top of the draft. Every mock draft I read in the last few months was loaded with hypothetical deals that blew up the top of draft order. Instead, we got … a lame pick swap between the Jets and Vikings at 10 and 11, respectively, allowing Minnesota to move up one spot to draft J.J. McCarthy.

What are we supposed to do with this? Where is our chaos, Roger?!

The relatively boring night—outside of Atlanta’s shocker—worked out in Minnesota’s favor. After New England held onto the third pick and took North Carolina QB Drake Maye, it looked as if the Vikings would have to make a desperate move up the board to jump in front of other QB-needy teams to land their guy. If Minnesota general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah had been reading the same mock drafts (with trades!) that I had been reading for the last few months, maybe he would have felt pressured into making such a deal. But he didn’t need to.

“Obviously, there were a lot of things outside of our control, so we wanted to make sure that we were ready for every scenario,” Adofo-Mensah said of Minnesota’s night. “We’re through the moon with what happened. We were able to add a cornerstone piece of the franchise in a quarterback who’s got a lot of potential, a lot of ability, who’s won at a high level in a lot of different places.”

The best part: Minnesota didn’t have to give up any Day 1 or Day 2 picks on Thursday night to get McCarthy. The Vikings went on to draft Dallas Turner with the 17th pick after swinging a trade with the Jaguars to move up six spots—a deal that may not have been possible if Adofo-Mensah had traded up for McCarthy in the top five. Brian Flores will surely be happy about adding Turner. The blitz-happy defensive coordinator needed more talent along his front, and the team just delivered a do-it-all edge defender with the athleticism to drop into coverage.

The Vikings offense should also suit McCarthy, a quarterback who didn’t shoulder much playmaking burden at Michigan—mainly because the Wolverines could just physically overwhelm their opponents. And so McCarthy mostly was a game manager, which is likely the same role Kevin O’Connell will put him in early on in his NFL career. The Vikings have the pieces for that kind of setup. The offensive line is strong. The receiving corps is loaded with talent in Justin Jefferson, T.J. Hockenson, and last year’s first-round pick, Jordan Addison. And O’Connell employs an offense that asks its quarterback to be a distributor first and foremost. McCarthy won’t have to make much of an adjustment from college to the NFL.

The future is bright in Minnesota. The Vikings got a new quarterback and a fun defensive prospect who fits their scheme perfectly. It was as good a night as the team could’ve had without trading up for one of the top quarterbacks. And the most chalky draft night in years made it possible.

Winner: Bill Belichick, the Analyst

Belichick is officially Media. The former Patriots coach, who signed a deal with ESPN after NFL teams snubbed him this offseason, made his debut as an analyst on Thursday night as a part of The Pat McAfee Show simulcast. Finally! After years of tormenting hard-working members of the media with dry non-answers and sarcastic quips, Belichick got to see what it’s like on the other side. He finally got a chance to experience just how grueling and how difficult this job can be. And guess what … he was pretty freaking good at it, dammit.

Anyone who’s watched any of the old “Beli-strator” segments on the Patriots team website knew the coach would nail the film breakdowns. But we couldn’t have predicted how open Belichick would be with his thoughts and opinions during the first round of the draft. At the top of the show, Belichick unveiled his big board, featuring his top 42 prospects in the class.

This is premium content that ESPN just gave away. I’m sure there are NFL teams that would have paid for that intel from Belichick. Some interesting takeaways from Bill’s board: Belichick had Jayden Daniels over Drake Maye as his QB2. He viewed Brock Bowers as a top-10 talent in the class. Alabama’s Dallas Turner was his top defensive player—and Turner landed with one of Belichick’s former assistants in Flores. And Belichick had Nix (36th on his board) rated higher than Penix, who did not make the cut.

Criticizing the Penix pick had to feel good for Belichick, who interviewed for the Falcons job and was ultimately passed over in part because of concerns how he’d get along with Fontenot in the front office. Atlanta may have picked the wrong side there.

Belichick did offer a more substantial analysis of the picks beyond his board. His film breakdowns of the top quarterbacks were particularly interesting. The old Patriots coach broke down the team’s new quarterback, no. 3 pick Maye, out of North Carolina, in a way which many interpreted as a negative evaluation.

But Belichick had Maye as the fifth-best prospect on his board, so maybe this is simply what he sounds like when he’s excited about a player. His evaluation of Daniels, the no. 2 player on his board, was more harsh. He mentioned Daniels’s speed and throwing ability as positives but also brought up his weakness attacking the middle of the field and even said he’d game plan around it if he were facing the LSU product on Sundays.

This is everything you’d want out of Belichick as an analyst. He’s not just making a comment on a player’s strengths and weaknesses. He’s providing real analysis and gives viewers a peek at how he views the game. It’s not often that we get that from truly legendary coaches, who typically hold on to their coaching jobs until retirement, and now we’re locked into at least one full NFL season of Belichick dropping these gems.

Loser: The 2024 Defensive Class

Has the NFL given up on the idea that defense wins championships? That’s how it felt Thursday night as we watched team after team ignore the best defensive prospects in the class to over-draft offensive prospects with questionable profiles. The Colts broke the seal by taking UCLA edge rusher Laiatu Latu with the no. 15 pick, ending a record run of 14 consecutive picks on the offensive side. Six quarterbacks went off the board before a single defender was taken, and just nine defensive players were selected in the first round, the fewest ever on that side of the ball.

If the defensive class is the big loser on the night, then we have to consider the teams drafting in the middle rounds the big winners. Indianapolis landed the best pure pass rusher in the draft in Latu and didn’t have to trade up for what is typically viewed as a premium skill set. Seattle added block-devouring nose tackle Byron Murphy II to Mike Macdonald’s defense with a mid-round pick. The Rams were able to wait for Florida State defensive end Jared Verse at no. 18. Miami picked up intriguing pass rusher Chop Robinson without having to move up the board. The Eagles walked away with the draft’s top corner in Quinyon Mitchell at pick no. 22, and the Lions added Terrion Arnold, the class’s second-best corner, two picks later. These are all fringe top-10 prospects who fell to above-average teams thanks to the league’s obsession with quarterbacks—not just drafting them, but also surrounding them with offensive linemen and pass catchers.

That obsession with the passing game partially explains what we saw at the top of the first round. The other significant factor is how defense is played in college, with teams routinely dropping eight defenders into coverage (rather than the NFL standard four), rarely playing press coverage, and using defensive line techniques that don’t always translate to the pro game. You watch a college football game, and it almost feels like they’re playing a different sport on that side of the ball. As a result, it’s seemingly harder than ever to evaluate defensive prospects. I wouldn’t anticipate this becoming a trend, though. With NIL and the transfer portal pushing college coaches to the NFL, we could see the gap between defensive schemes at the pro and college levels start to shrink. And it’s not often that we see a draft class this deep at quarterback—a position this league will always value—and a draft board with so many teams desperate for a new signal-caller.

Loser: Sean Payton’s Clock in Denver

We’ve waited a year to see how Payton’s master plan for bringing a franchise quarterback to Denver would unfold, and on Thursday night, we got the underwhelming reveal. The future of the Broncos franchise (and Payton’s job security) now rests in the hands of Bo Nix, a 24-year-old QB whom many pundits saw as a day two prospect with no spectacular physical traits to speak of. We’ve seen quarterbacks with a similar skill set—an accurate, quick-processing game-manager—thrive in the NFL, but they’re typically found on the second day of the draft and not with a top-12 pick.

But Nix’s predraft scouting reports no longer matter. He won’t be judged based on where he was going in mock drafts the past few months. He’ll no longer be viewed as a decent prospect with a chance to land a starting gig one day. Now that he’s been drafted with a premium pick and by a coach with a reputation as a QB whisperer, Nix will have to deal with real expectations. And if he doesn’t work out, the failure will fall on Payton, who’s already tried and failed to make one quarterback work in Denver. It seems unlikely he’ll get a third shot, which means all of Payton’s eggs are in the Bo Nix basket. That is not a spot any coach should want to be in. And it’s a brutal spot to be in as a Hall-of-Fame-level coach who’s talked a whole mess of shit for the past year. This had better work.