That coin toss. I tell ya. We thought it might prove costly, but little did we know just how costly. The Raiders and 49ers finished with identical records and strength of schedule so the two teams had to flip a coin to see who drafted first at picks 9 and 10. The 49ers won that toss and set the ball rolling for potentially drafting the player the Raiders wanted.
That’s just what happened, with the 49ers nabbing Notre Dame offensive tackle Mike McGlinchey. But the Raiders were trying to limit the cost of the lost coin toss to a some lower round draft picks in trade and were ultimately unsuccessful in doing so, according to MMQB’s Albert Breer.
There were rumblings on the afternoon of the draft that the Raiders were looking to trade up for Notre Dame OT Mike McGlinchey, and the teams I spoke with didn’t know who they were trying to leap-frog to get him. Evidently, they figured out that the team across the bay had eyes for him, even though he hadn’t been linked to the 49ers much during the process. And sure enough, San Francisco was the team that Oakland wound up losing him to, with McGlinchey going ninth overall.
With the clear top tackle off the board, the Raiders then looked to trade down. They knew they wanted a tackle, but Kolton Miller was not a good value at 10 overall. So, they let the Cardinals take advantage of them, giving them poor compensation (3rd and 5th round picks) to move down to 15 while the Cardinals got their hopeful franchise QB in Josh Rosen.
As much of an apparent steep talent decline there is between McGlinchey and Miller, there was a cliff after Miller, so the Raiders attempted to make the best of a bad situation. One that, we didn’t quite know then, was created at the scouting combine on March 2 with a simple coin flip.
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