Giants GM Dave Gettleman won’t rule out trading down from No. 2

Dave Gettleman has run five NFL Drafts as a general manager, all with the Panthers, accounting for 28 picks. He’s taken a number of different positions at different levels of the selection process, has traded up to get players he wanted, and has left very little in the way of breadcrumbs that help decipher what he could be thinking going into this year’s draft, his first with the Giants.

The one clue that does emerge is that he has never traded down. Even that, though, is something Gettleman admitted he will exploring this week with the highly valued, highly coveted No. 2 overall pick.

“It just kind of never happened, I guess,” Gettleman said Thursday. “There was nothing ever meaningful enough that would keep me from the player that we had who was there for us to take. In Carolina, I never got a meaningful enough offer to trade back.”

In Carolina, though, he never had the No. 2 overall pick with a highly touted crop of quarterbacks in a league starving for talent at that position. Gettleman said he’s already received calls from teams regarding that No. 2 pick, and he did not dismiss the idea that he could wind up taking one of those offers.

“Depending on who’s still on the board, I’m open to it,” he said. “You have to be open to everything. You have to listen. You can’t be afraid of conversation.”

Trading back, of course, theoretically would put the Giants in position to draft a player of lesser value than they would get at No. 2, when they’ll have their choice of everyone available but one. It also would mean that the Giants could pick up more picks in this draft, or future drafts.

“Sometimes you have to look at it this way,” Gettleman said before launching into a parable. “We’re all in school, all right? Do you want to get an A and four Cs? Or do you want an A-minus, a couple of B-pluses, and a couple of Bs?”

Winning, Gettleman said, requires depth. Sometimes at the expense of superstars.

“There are different ways of looking at it, depending on what the A looks like,” he said. “But if you get a chance to accumulate quality and put yourself in a position to potentially accumulate picks and bring in a lot of solid players, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.