Rams Had Quick and Jenkins Close to Blackmon, Ahead of Floyd, Wright on Board

Post-draft dispatches from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch are giving us more evidence that there is fire to some of the pre-draft smoke about player-team pairings. They're also showing us how different some teams' boards can be from the mainstream.

Nine days before the draft, Tony Pauline from SI.com and TFYDraftInsider reported that the St. Louis Rams would take WR AJ Jenkins in the third round, and that Jenkins had been moving up boards, potentially going in the late second.

Pauline had the team interest and moving up boards part right, but got the round wrong. Jenkins actually went in the first round to the San Francisco 49ers at No. 30. Jim Thomas of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported the next day that the Rams had a similar grade on Jenkins as they did on Justin Blackmon .

The Rams had the first pick of the second round and selected Appalachian State WR Brian Quick. Thomas was able to fill in one more blank on the Rams draft board after the pick:

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...they were so enamored of Quick, they rated him as 1B of the five, right behind Oklahoma State's Justin Blackmon at 1A. Next came Illinois' A.J. Jenkins, followed by Michael Floyd of Notre Dame and Kendall Wright of Baylor.

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With two reports that the Rams had other receivers had close to Justin Blackmon on their draft board, what should we make of Mike Silver's report at Yahoo! Sports that Rams head coach Jeff Fisher "slammed his eyeglasses onto the table and uttered a one-syllable expletive" when he learned that the Jaguars had traded up for the fifth pick to take Blackmon?

If the Rams really had Jenkins and Quick close to Blackmon, there would be no reason to lament missing on him at the sixth overall pick when they already two early second-round picks to likely snag one or both of the wideouts. It sounds like the team could be leaking information to soften the blow of missing out on the top wide receiver in the 2012 NFL Draft.