I know it's tough to justify, but sometimes your 20th draft pick becomes as important as your first. It's a mistake judging an entire draft class by what the first guy does.

I'll say this: The leverage of having the first pick is in signing your draft pick before the draft,

You're starting to see this team formulate. If nothing becomes available, what you see is what you're going to get.

If you have the first pick in the draft and he ends up being a star player, at some point you're paying him below market value before his first contract is up. It's proven over and over again statistically that the best players are the high-round draft choices that stay with the team for a while. Obviously, you need a core of star players.

I tell him you're going to have another top 10 pick again in the draft, he tells me what they're gonna do to us. Carnell is like a brother to me. . . . We love each other. We'll keep it tight. We just try to compete against each other so much. . . . He knows we're gunning for him. He's going to try to do his best to run us over, especially me. He's got a big hit out for me.

Think about what you deal with in the NFL. You get one first-round draft pick per year, but at USC you get about six or seven.