Bob McNair Quotes

I used to tell people that in 2012 when I was trying to understand where am I most likely to be drafted and who are the three or four teams that have pursued me the most and it would make sense that they would pick me, I never thought of who would be least likely to draft me.

Draft day is a hectic day, especially for draftees and, more or less, for management.

If you look around, there are very few really super quarterbacks. There are just very few. If you're lucky enough to have one, lucky enough that one of these Andrew Lucks is available when you have the top pick, then that's just a matter of luck. You can't attribute that to anything else.

The draft not being exceptionally deep, you basically take the best player available.

You can't draft for need. You draft for need, you get fired. Draft the best player, and if you've got two of them now you've got three of them. Just take the best players available for you.

I always wanted to be the No. 1 pick, but come draft night anything can happen - trades, or anything like that.

If Cleveland takes me No. 1, it would be a great opportunity, first of all, and that goes for anyone taking me in any position.

You want to be in the first round. That's the dream. That's what you see on draft night.

You go to the draft board and think, 'Here's a nose tackle. Who needs a nose tackle?' Well, eight teams in front of you need a nose tackle, and there's two nose tackles. It's something you have to figure out where you can get the players to play in your system.

So, there's no guarantee in the NFL that if you've got the No. 1 pick or you've got a top-five pick, that you're going to be able to draft a franchise quarterback.

The Draft is about the re-generation of hope and excitement for teams. Every pick your team makes could be the next Tom Brady. He could be the guy who turns around the fortune of the franchise.

I definitely would embrace that opportunity to be the No. 1 overall pick, obviously that every quarterback would love to be that. It's no different for me.

From watching the draft and following the NFL closely, anything can happen in the draft. But to me, it's not where I get drafted that matters to me, to be completely honest.

At the end of the day you never know what team still wants what player. You just never know with the draft.

You pick guys in the first round - whenever you pick guys - you pick them for a reason.

In the NFL you get one first-round draft pick if you're lucky. You couldn't really outwork anybody else. In college I could recruit ten players with first-round talent every year.

I have no preferred team, but everyone wants to go No. 1 in the draft. Even the guy who gets picked last in the draft wants to go No. 1. But I just know that whoever picks me, I'm going to be excited to play for that team, and I can't wait to see myself in 'Madden' on that team.

One of the things I noticed more in this draft than in any recent drafts was the importance of the character issue. Players who had baggage, like Justice, fell much farther than his talent dictated. But a lot of coaches didn't want to take the chance.

It's not just the NFL. Every other league has a draft. It has been fundamental to the success of professional sports.

I want to be on a successful team, and I know that paying one or two or three players premium hurts your chances of being able to bring in extra talent.

During my draft process, I had Seattle come and work me out. This is one of the places where I thought I might be drafted. I'm glad it worked out I'm here.

In 1969, we decided we had to do certain things technically to win, and we decided to do them then, even though we knew some of the personnel couldn't do it. In other words, instead of adapting the system to the players, we just installed our system. Then we set out to fill our team through the draft.

If we kept all the players I liked personally, we'd be a lot worse team over the years.

All of us that have teams want to pick the right people. I've thought a lot about that. In the NFL, we've got 13 scouts traveling the country. We're trying to pick 22 year-olds coming out of college who will be successful in the NFL. It's very hard to do. What I've learned is it's always character first.

I used to say my biggest accomplishment was just getting drafted, whether it was the first pick or the 100th or whatever.