So much useful information per Ryan O'Halloran's Redskins 360 Blog that I cannot post it all. Do yourself a favor and check out the entire post, which is essentially a Redskins recap of a Mel Kiper Teleconference. His thoughts on Quinn and Peterson, Okoye and Landry (and as they relate to the 'Skins), and plenty of other info is there. Two things I want to quickly point out. First, Kiper on trading down (emphasis mine):
"Forget the chart," he said. "You don't have to worry about getting chart value. Who cares. It's a draft pick you're getting. But the attitude there is, we can't get any help in the fourth or fifth round. Sure you can. You can get a starter in the fourth round. They're not going to get chart value so if they're at six, they're staying at six."
I've married myself pretty heavily to that Draft Value Chart previously by linking to it constantly. We're getting divorced. The Draft Value Chart is a good starting place but cannot account for the annual ebb and flow of talent coming out of College. All 6th picks are not created equal; some years might be better than others. Nothing that has been said or suggested by the Talking Heads (and they're never wrong!) tells me that the 6th pick is significantly more valuable than the 8th pick given the Redskins needs.
I know that a 4th rounder is really stretching it in the quality department as that is at the tail end of day one and doesn't necessarily lead to a starter. Still, if we had to move down for just a 4th rounder I would welcome the apparent philosophical shift more than anything. It would indicate that the Redskins finally realized that More is More as pertains to the Draft and that you can't get quality Drafted players if you don't have picks. Mel Kiper (per Redskins 360) had some thoughts on our current philosophy: