Broncos front office gets big measure of disrespect ahead of draft

The Denver Broncos are busy preparing for the upcoming NFL Draft, but the team has just five selections and won't make one until the third round, barring a trade.

That could be one of the major reasons why Gregg Rosenthal of NFL.com does not give general manager George Paton and the rest of the front office a very friendly grade ahead of the annual selection process.

In his updated rankings of NFL general managers, Rosenthal puts Paton at the No. 25 spot. That's bad, considering there are 32 NFL teams, but it's made worse by the fact that the other seven general managers were deemed "too new" to rank.

In other words, of those GMs that he did rank, Rosenthal puts Paton at the very bottom.

Though Sean Payton has been brought on as the team's new head coach, Rosenthal believes that the combination of trading for Russell Wilson and then hiring Nathaniel Hackett as the head coach were nothing short of disastrous.

Now, Broncos fans may read all of that and feel like it's complete hogwash, but it's really not. From what we have to go on so far, which is just last season, both of those moves were absolutely terrible. They were so bad that the Broncos had to trade more assets away to bring in Payton to (hopefully) clean up the mess.

Paton hit on a really good draft class in 2021, starting out great for the team. He then made the trade to acquire Wilson, which was met with a thunderous applause in Broncos Country. But since that move, the team has been in a complete tailspin. The 2022 draft class was nothing to write home about and the free-agent signing of Randy Gregory was, at least to this point, a really bad move.

Paton will have the upcoming draft to change perception and if the team turns things around next year, perhaps Rosenthal and other members of the media will be a little bit more positive toward what Paton has built.

However, as things currently stand, placing Paton at No. 25 out of 25 is probably right where he should be and if he is in that spot after this season, he probably won't have to worry about getting ranked as Broncos GM anymore.