2012 NFL Mock Draft season is starting disturbingly early, if you're a St. Louis Rams fan, but it's hard to get around it: The most interesting thing going on over the bye week has been speculation about what the No. 1 pick could earn a team that didn't want to draft Andrew Luck for itself. Mike Sando checks in on the subject in his latest NFC West mailbag, establishing some of the tropes we're likely to hear about as long as the Rams are o-fer. For instance: the Rams will probably not want to trade the pick to the Seattle Seahawks, who need a quarterback as badly as any team in football but have managed to stumble into two wins.
↵As for what they could earn in trade, he brings up one especially relevant deal—the Chargers trading the first pick of the 2011 NFL Draft—the Mike Vick draft—to the Falcons for the fifth pick, the 67th, a 2002 second-rounder, and Tim Dwight, a young, dangerous, and wholly inconsistent wide receiver and punt returner. That's the kind of haul that could build a team's depth in ways the Rams appear to deeply need, and with another early pick the Rams might be in a position to take a wide receiver like Justin Blackmon.
↵This, of course, is still 12 weeks away—as long as the Rams are in the NFC West it's hard to keep them out of playoff talk, let alone in first-overall-pick talk.
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