Patriots Make a Trade, Then Select Versatile Oklahoma DE Geneo Grissom in 3rd Round
The New England Patriots had an opportunity to draft the two best players on their board. Instead, they let someone else make the decision on one of those players.
The Patriots traded one of their two third-round picks (96th overall) as well as one of their seventh-round picks (219th overall) to the Cleveland Browns in return for a fourth-round pick (111th overall), fifth-round pick (147th overall), and a sixth-round pick (202nd overall).
The Browns selected Washington State defensive tackle Xavier Cooper with the 96th pick.
Sometimes, a team will draft a player without knowing exactly where he’ll project with the team, and allow the situation to work itself out when that player gets into the fold.
That appears to be the direction the team will take with their third-round pick (97th overall), Oklahoma’s Geneo Grissom. The 6-foot-3, 262-pound “football player’’ was a tight end for half a season, but mostly played on defense in his four-year career with the Sooners.
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He bounced around as a defensive end, defensive tackle, and linebacker over the years; with 33.4-inch arms, Grissom has the length to play on the end of the Patriots’ defense as either an outside linebacker in a 3-4 or a defensive end in the 4-3.
He is considered a raw prospect, with some burst off the snap (as evidenced by his 37-inch vertical jump, among the top five prospects at defensive end at the scouting combine), but he will need to improve his overall agility and ability to turn the corner off the edge if he’s going to develop into a solid pass-rusher at the next level.
He notched 39 tackles and 3.5 sacks in 2014, on his way to earning an All-Big 12 honorable mention. He finished his career at Oklahoma with 88 tackles, 17 for loss, and 8 sacks.
Grissom is going to fit right in with New England sports fans.
“I love hockey. The Bruins are awesome. Chara’s a beast,’’ Grissom said, when asked what he’s looking forward to.
The Patriots are going to be one very busy team on Saturday, with seven picks in the final four rounds of the draft.
“We had a little bit of spacing there [with picks] at the top of the fourth, bottom of the fourth, no fifth but top of the sixth, top of the seventh, [and the] bottom of the seventh [rounds],’’ Belichick said in a press conference on Friday night. “Now we’ve kind of filled in — we have three picks in the fourth round, and we kind of filled in that fifth round at 147. That’s seven picks in the rounds remaining. With the spacing they have, it’s nice. It’s a little bit unusual. Normally, we pick and wait and pick and wait. Here, I’d say we have a little bit of a flow where if we lose a guy, then it’s not too far where we’ll probably be able to get the next guy, whereas if we lose a guy and then you’re sitting there for 20-something picks and then you lose a couple more guys.’’
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