On Thursday, we made a decision to go with Mario, and we said that if we could get him, then let's sign him. We were confident we could have worked a deal with Bush, too, but we made the decision to go with defense over offense because our pass rush hasn't been what it needed to be. |
People have asked me to think of a comparable situation. I can't think of one. |
Right now we have nobody interested in that first pick, so we have gone ahead and begun negotiations with two players. |
The best thing for this football team was to use the first pick in this draft to add a premier player at another position. Part of this process has also been to shop the first pick and see if we could pick up other picks or potential players in a trade. Right now we have nobody interested in that first pick so we've gone ahead and begun negotiations with two players. |
The number really doesn't mean anything to us because we go through a process of four or five other ways to evaluate it. The number's insignificant to us in the end. It's the other areas that we put more weight on. |
The player is one of the better receivers in the league. He got market. Obviously, everyone knows the issues with the guy, but if he goes out and plays on the field and shows up every day, he is one of the top receivers in football. |
There aren't a lot of options still out there. But it's like any other position. You're going to keep evaluating it every day. We're a long ways from being a complete football team. So we're liable to add players on any day at any position throughout training camp. |
There never was any shift because we never made a decision. It was the media that said we made a decision. We never made a decision. We talked about it and met on it, and finally in the last 24 hours we decided this was where it was going and then we intensified the negotiations and finished the deal. We like Bush and he's deserving of the first pick, but we just wanted to go defense. That's all it was. We just wanted to go defense. |
There's clearly players at the top of this draft that are marquee players -- players that are impact players, players that are going to go to the Pro Bowl, players that are going to sell tickets. We're going to get offers for this pick. |
There's no gloom and doom here. All of us have been through tough times before. |
They're both great players. Young's an excellent athlete, a winner and a leader. I think he'll be a fine quarterback. |
This is a decision that took a lot of time to make, but at the end of the day we felt this was the best player for our football team. Both players, Reggie Bush and Mario Williams, are going to, I think, be great pros. We made the decision to go with defense. |
This was a football decision. It's harder to find a defensive end than running backs. When we looked at our team, we've got to get better on offense, but we've got to get better on defense, too. In eight games, we lost the lead in the second half because we couldn't rush the passer. |
We all know this is a guessing game. It's humans evaluating humans, and you know what? We're not infallible, and they're not infallible either. If there's one thing you can say about those of us who do this for a living, it's that we know we don't know. |
We arrived at this decision a short time back that these are the two players that we would pick from to make our first round pick. |