Baker Mayfield's agent suggests Patriots might have been in play for No. 2 pick

Jack Mills, the agent for Baker Mayfield, said they were told the Patriots were a possibility for the Oklahoma quarterback in this year’s draft.

Speaking with Andrew Brandt of MMQB.com, Mills says that he was pretty much aware of the fact Mayfield wasn’t going to get past the third overall pick, which belonged to the Jets. But by the sound of things, New England was lurking in the weeds.


“We had another team — which is going to surprise you,” Mills said. “Another team said, ‘You may get a big surprise on draft day at number two if he is available.' And it was the Patriots.

“They had 23 and they had 31 and they had two seconds and … I don’t know. We thought, ‘Boy, that’s going to be a heck of a move to get up that high from where they are.’ And of course, he wasn’t available, so we never knew if that was a reality or not.”

Mayfield ended up going first overall to the Browns, while the Patriots didn’t take a quarterback until LSU’s Danny Etling in the seventh round.

After Day One of the draft, Patriots personnel chief Nick Caserio was asked about putting in work when it came to evaluating top quarterbacks like and Sam Darnold.

“Yeah, we evaluate those players,” he replied. “I mean in the case of Oklahoma, like they have more than one player so like our process is we go through, we evaluate those players, we grade them, we put them in a system, we assign a grade. So it's not like, ‘Well we think this guy is going to go in the top five. We're not going to spend any time on him.’ We spend as much time on players that we may or may not pick, we may pick, but that's just part of our job. We're just trying to get as much information as possible.

“Look, you never know when it's going to become useful, but you have to evaluate the player. It's not, ‘Well what did you think of Mayfield? He's going to go here. Well, we didn't evaluate him.’ That's the wrong answer. That's not going to cut it here. I would say like if coach (Belichick) said, 'Well hey, take it if we looked at this guy’ and the answer is ‘Well, he's going to go in the top five.’ Well, that doesn't really matter.”