Andy Richardson

The NFL draft is now just three days away, and as both an NFL fan and a dynasty owner, I feel like a kid at Christmas. Various trades have landed me four of the top 16 picks in my rookie draft, so I'm more excited for this draft than any previous one. And I'm sure plenty of NFL GMs and their teams' fans feel the same way.

A few things might change over the next few days -- trades and whatnot -- but here are my "final" thoughts right now....

Trades: Let's assume that most of the players rumored to be traded will in fact be traded. We'll send Braylon Edwards from Cleveland to the Giants, and Anquan Boldin from Arizona to....Baltimore....and Julius Peppers from Carolina to New England. Let's also send Brady Quinn to some team that loses out on their Matt Sanchez dreams, either the Jets or Washington. Even if all of these deals don't happen, some of them (and possibly a few others) will. It should be a wild weekend of deals, so dynasty owners might want to spend the next few days seeing if they can acquire players like Quinn or Derek Anderson cheaply -- maybe their starting prospects will be clearer by Saturday.

Who's No. 1? Three months ago I figured the top two rookies to draft were WR Michael Crabtree and RB Knowshon Moreno (in dynasty formats). And I feel the same today. Right now, I think I'd probably take Crabtree first, but that could change if Moreno ends up somewhere that I'm confident he'll be featured from the get-go. The Eagles are a popular destination, and while he'd likely start some games and maybe even be featured in a couple of years, Moreno's appeal would definitely suffer in a committee with a talent like Brian Westbrook. I also think there are enough other intriguing running backs that I could pass on Moreno and get another quality back with a later pick. It's a deeper class at wide receiver, but also riskier (to me); as a for instance, I figured Robert Meachem was a future star, and obviously that hasn't happened. Crabtree looks certain enough that he's the guy I'd take first, right now anyway.

Location, location. As with Moreno above, place some value on where players end up -- but not TOO much value. A year ago, I thought it was pretty clear that Chris Johnson was going into a near-ideal situation in Tennessee. With only LenDale White ahead of him, there was no one to keep Johnson on the sideline. That said, things also looked pretty good for Jonathan Stewart and Rashard Mendenhall, going to run-first teams that only had the disappointing (at the time) DeAngelo Williams and injury-prone Willie Parker ahead of them. And that didn't work out. Meanwhile there looked like a logjam of players ahead of Steve Slaton, but he quickly zipped ahead of all them. So, focus on the player first, the situation second. Because the latter is less predictable than the former.

Happy returns. What do DeSean Jackson and Eddie Royal have in common? Besides being the top rookie wideouts from last year's draft, both were viewed by many as primarily return men at the NFL level. Meanwhile, the popular assumption was that James Hardy would be the top rookie receiver. So when you see a team use a second- or third-round pick on a speedy little wideout, and the talking heads say that he'll help out immediately on returns, don't rule out him helping out immediately as a receiver. Steve Smith, Santana Moss, Jackson and Royal -- I'll be looking to pluck the next one of these types of players out of my upcoming draft.

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