When Mel Kiper Jr. completely lost the plot on Day 3 of the NFL Draft, Rece Davis brought him back to Earth.
Davis, who hosted ESPN’s coverage of Rounds 4-7 after doing ABC for Rounds 1-3 on Thursday and Friday, locked horns with ESPN’s lead NFL Draft analyst. Even after Shedeur Sanders had been drafted by the Cleveland Browns, ending his surprising tumble into Day 3, Kiper still wasn’t confronting reality.
Davis, who recently rejected an offer from Fox Sports to stay at ESPN, frankly told Kiper that yelling at the NFL wouldn’t solve anything. That’s when Kiper ripped a “clueless” league for misevaluating quarterbacks over the span of five decades.
ESPN’s College GameDay reminded Kiper that nobody’s batted 1.000 but everyone at home thought Davis hit a home run.
He didn’t silence Kiper, but made a point that seemed to resoante with the masses.
“First of all, and I’m not doing that thing that Pete Thamel accuses me of, where I say two things nice about somebody and then offer a critique or something,” Davis said during a recent appearance on OutKick’s Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich. “But, the reason there were…whatever the number was in Detroit is largely due to what Mel’s done for the draft. And Mel’s job is to make his rankings of the players, and defend them. And I didn’t mind him disagreeing, and I don’t mind him saying anything he wanted to say when we’re there. But I thought that as a group, the part we were overlooking was the old Occam’s razor philosophy — the most likely explanation for something is probably correct. We don’t know for sure.
“But it was almost certain that at that point in the draft that something had happened in the pre-draft process involving Shedeur Sanders that was keeping teams from taking him. Now, I think it’s a reasonable debate if you say he’s not a top-five quarterback on tape at this time. I’m not sure that it’s reasonable that he’s not a first or second-round type guy. That seems a little unreasonable to me. So, if you go beyond that, then something else probably happened. And my point was I didn’t think we were giving that the proper credence. If teams are drafting a guy they’re not 1000% sold on is going to be their franchise quarterback… then you have to bigger than your problems.”
Davis had a point. Shedeur Sanders wasn’t bigger than his problems, at least in the eyes of the 31 other NFL teams. Even the Browns, who passed on him six times, chose Oregon’s Dillon Gabriel over the embattled Colorado star.
“At that point, it was pretty obvious to me that they didn’t see it that way, and that was the long and short of it,” Davis said. “There was nothing else there. It’s not because, in my judgment, people couldn’t evaluate quarterbacks. But the thing that I love about Mel is that he stuck to what he believed; he kept on. And the other thing that I’ve pointed out on my podcast yesterday, there was never a problem between Mel and me. I had people asking, ‘You guys OK?’ Yeah, we’re great. Mel’s a legend. I love working with Mel. We didn’t have a single crossword in between. We’re still joking about the beach in Delaware and why he won’t try certain things at dinner.”
Davis clarified that there is no animosity between him and Kiper
“It’s fine. I didn’t even know there was an issue until I started getting texts like you were saying,” he said. “It’s sort of part and parcel of what we do. Sometimes, for the analyst’s own good and for the good of the show, you challenge their position. Mel’s great. I love working with Mel. And he’s the reason the draft is what it is, in my opinion.”
Davis added that ESPN’s draft coverage serves a different purpose than ABC’s, which features his GameDay cohorts and takes a more storytelling-driven, human-interest approach. ESPN’s broadcast, in contrast, allows for a more direct critique of players and picks.
“The idea behind College GameDay at the Draft is to document the draft first, of course,” he says. “But it’s also to tell, our research shows, a somewhat more casual football audience. ‘Who is this guy? What is he about? Why should you root for him? Why would you like him? What has he overcome to get here? What’s a quirk in his personality that’s entertaining, or amusing, or something?’ So, we try to balance a little bit of that. ‘OK, here’s what he’s going to bring to the Bears,’ as opposed to ‘Why did they trade four draft picks for this? This is a bad move.’ We don’t do a lot of that. It’s more like, ‘OK, this is what led us to this point to get there.’
“Then, on Saturday, it’s a little bit more about ‘Did they overpay? Did they pick a guy too high? Did they pick low? Is this guy a good fit for the scheme? That’s a little bit more of what we get into on Saturday.”
And Davis got into it with Kiper, but he insists there’s no issue between them.