No NFL Draft result is more fun than your favorite team getting a future 1st-round pick in a trade

Just about every year, my favorite team, the Jacksonville Jaguars, disappoints me in the NFL Draft. They’re truly terrible at it. Jalen Ramsey is the only Pro Bowler — or really even a player you can call “good” — the Jaguars have picked in the first round in over a decade.

But the Jaguars also let me down another way: I cross my fingers every year that it’ll be the year they trade down and get another team’s future first-round pick. They never do.

That’s not all Jacksonville’s fault. A team can’t unilaterally decide to pick up a future first-round pick in a trade. It takes another franchise so infatuated with a prospect — usually a quarterback — that it’s willing to forgo significant future draft capital to get that player.

But it’d be nice if they finally made that happen, because I just really, really want to spend a whole NFL season rooting against a single team.

I was jealous of Oakland Raiders fans during the 2018 season, who got to spend the year hoping the Bears and Cowboys would fall on their face — even if it didn’t really go that well and both teams made the playoffs.

I was jealous of Cleveland Browns fans a year before that, when they watched the Texans nosedive into a 4-12 season. Houston gave up its 2018 first-round pick to move up for Deshaun Watson and it ended up giving the Browns the No. 4-overall selection. The Browns weren’t in much of a celebrating mood after a winless year, though.

Near the end of that terrible season, SB Nation’s Browns blog, Dawgs By Nature, posted weekly rooting guides that essentially boiled down to Go Whatever-Team-Is-Playing-Houston once the Browns locked up the No. 1 pick.

Give me some of that delicious schadenfreude, please.

Imagine the best case scenario: You get to watch your favorite team have a great year and go to the playoffs, while another team falls on its face and sends your favorite team a top-five draft pick. It doesn’t really ever work out like that, but crossing your fingers for that scenario is better than hyping up a rookie.

The Jaguars’ extensive history of whiffing in the draft means they’d probably end up wasting that future first-round pick anyway. But at least it’d be a fun road to get there.