Ran Carthon made his first-ever pick as the general manager of the Tennessee Titans on Thursday night following his selection of offensive lineman Peter Skoronski out of Northwestern.
After making the pick, Carthon addressed the media and said Skoronski “checks all he boxes” for the Titans.
“Peter [Skoronski] checks all the boxes for us, and what we’re looking for in an offensive [lineman], and what we’re looking for in our program,” Carthon said, per Jim Wyatt of Titans Online.
“He’s a guy that, truth be told, we targeted from the beginning, but we didn’t know if he was going to be there or not,” he added. “So, we had other contingency plans in place. But we got lucky, and he was there, and so it made the pick real easy to pull off at 11.”
Much like Carthon, I was surprised Skoronski was there for the Titans as well. After all, he got past the Chicago Bears who made what was an unexpected pick in my opinion with tackle Darnell Wright.
In the hours leading up to the draft, there was plenty of buzz that the Titans may trade up for C.J. Stroud. However, that did not come to fruition.
When asked about that, Carthon said he was doing his due diligence, as he did with possibly trading back.
“If you guys remember when we spoke – I guess it was Monday – and I told you guys about everybody being nosey, that included me,” Carthon said with a smile, per ESPN’s Turron Davenport. “You have to know all the scenarios, above you, below you, so we called everybody, whether it was teams above us, teams below us, just exploring to see where we were going to be.
“And it’s funny – Mike and I were just talking about it downstairs – how they came off [the board] is about how we predicted and what we thought was going to be there for us at 11 to choose from.
“We did think Peter was going to go a little higher than expected, but we would’ve loved for him to fall to us, and he did.”
