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It seems that every year a player emerges from the draft stating that a team claimed they would call him up at a certain spot but didn’t.
One of those players this year is Lewis Cine, the Vikings’ security guard. Via SI.com, Cine recently told Richard Sherman that an unnamed team that holds 27th place overall (i.e., the Buccaneers) have repeatedly said they would take him if he were there.
He was. The Bucs didn’t take him.
“I had a team when I was twenty-seven,” Cine said. “You know who you are. I won’t name names. It was twenty-seven. The whole process – if you are in – we will choose you. You move to the first pick of the second round. I think damn they made me so dirty.”
The Buccaneers may have calculated that Cine would still be in 33rd place. But for the Vikings, who would have put him 32nd, he would have been.
“We had a few players at 27 that we targeted,” said coach Todd Bowles on the second night of the draft. “Back to 33, that was the first [pick] Today we had another guy there. The others went off the board, so it wouldn’t have been wise for us to trade back down and lose the guy we wanted.”
Obviously, that doesn’t fit with Cine’s claim. But let’s be realistic. Bowles would never admit even if it were 100 percent true that they wanted Cine, they traded down and bet Cine was still there and they lost the risk so they went for the defensive end of Logan Hall decided.