Mesidor age being a knock is so funny to me. Guys are not staying with the same team their whole career. You aren’t drafting a guy in first round with some guarantee he will be there 10 years. If you can get 3 great years out of a 1st round player you are doing good. For example Parsons and Phillips. Mesidor will easily give a team 3 great years. So you might as well grab him while you can. It’s a win now league. Not win in 5 years.
The google AI thing tells me that the average career length for a 1st round pick is 9.3 years vs. 3.3 years for all players (believe this is the source:
https://runrepeat.com/nfl-player-career-length). 45% of 1st round Edges resigned with the team that drafted them from 2009-18 (
https://www.joebucsfan.com/2023/05/...aft-picks-getting-second-contracts-with-team/). It's not clear from that data whether "bust" means a 1st round pick who didn't sign a second contract
with anyone or just a 1st round pick who signed a second contract
with a different team. After the 2020 CBA, teams now can exercise a 5th year option on 1st round picks, but there isn't data on whether 5th year exercised 1st round picks are more likely or not to resign with the team that drafted them.
So, I'm assuming the argument goes that: if a 1st round pick is good, they are more likely than not to come to terms on a second contract with the team that drafted them than another team. If you're drafting a guy in the 1st round who is age 22 or 23 in his first year he'd be in his age 27/28 season the first year of his second deal.
Mesidor will be 25.5 when the 2026 NFL season starts, so he would be 30.5 at the start of his second contract (assuming the team picks up the 5th year option if he were a 1st round pick. The expected production on his second contract is going to be much less than from a similarly talented player who is age 22/23 the first year he plays.
The thing I wonder about is now that there is the 5th year option is whether NFL teams would be better off drafting older players higher than before, because they could potentially have less dead money on the second contract. Like, I imagine a lot of the younger guys who are good during their first contract fall off a cliff at some point during their second contract and are cut. With Mesidor you could draft him 1st round, get 5 years from him at the rookie scale, then just franchise him for a year or two. After that he's likely going to be too old to be a standout NFL player.
