What Should the Chargers Do If They End Up with the #1 Pick in the NFL Draft?

The draft order went up on the screen, and with it came the question nobody in Los Angeles wants to hear yet: if the Chargers end up with the top pick, do they draft a quarterback and move on from Justin Herbert?

Rich's answer was immediate. "You're the Chargers. You hold Herbert and you say, here Justin. Here's Jeremiah Smith."

From there, the show went team by team down the order. The Titans are not taking another quarterback. "You're not." They are already down the road with Cam Ward, who played well his last time out. As was pointed out on set, Kurt Warner said on Wednesday's show that of all the quarterbacks he watched on film that week, Caleb Williams and Ward had the best games. Maybe that's recency bias, or maybe the light is going on. "He's that talented."

The Dolphins could be a quarterback landing spot, but a new regime might also decide to build the roster with a lineman or another player, pointing to the way they drafted last year.

Then there's Philadelphia. If every quarterback is available and the Eagles are on the clock, the take on set was clear: "I still think this is Jalen Hurts's world." Even so, the noise is coming. Colleagues in Bristol and New York are already running topic bars asking whether Hurts has played his last snap as an Eagle. "You don't think that'll be out there in the ether all next spring?"

The bigger question is whether the Chargers would even keep the pick, and who would trade up for it. Nobody on set had a clear answer. Everyone knows how the spring works. Quarterbacks always get pushed up "due to need and hype and oh pro day this and oh wait, film that. Oh god, he's incredible. He's got to go." Maybe it's the Dolphins because they love somebody. Maybe it's the Jets. The joke on set was that it would be just the Jets' luck to get three cracks at a quarterback in a class that isn't that good and still miss on all of them.

That's when the real debate broke out. The counterargument on set was that if you're the Chargers, you think about trading Herbert and hitting reset. "With the picks you'd get for Herbert, you can restart five years on a rookie quarterback."

"That's crazy talk," came the response.

Rich made the case for the other path. To borrow a phrase Mike McDaniel once used, "with all due respect, I would rather swap out the OC." In Rich's view, Jim Harbaugh knows exactly what Herbert is. The problem, he argued, is that the team "didn't play football the way that I'm used to as Jim Harbaugh. I went down a different road with Mike McDaniel. It didn't work out."

Rich imagined Harbaugh's message to the fan base. "I'm sorry Chargers fans that want something more exotic. I smash mouth people with a fullback and an offensive line and we dominate and we play action and we throw that way. That's the way we play football." What they did this year "clearly wasn't best for me and Justin Herbert." Rich would rather go that way than hit the reset button.

The rebuttal was blunt: maybe they don't know who he is, and it just didn't work. "It's been seven years."

However it shakes out, as one voice on set put it, "This all coming down the pike."