BakoSaint

You make a good point for the advantages of lying but I think you need to consider the disadvantages. Sure, a team should try as best as it can to disguise its draft intentions. That could include exaggerating Ram's injury or it could include exaggerating positives such as saying there is a lot of time left before the start of the season and things could turn around, or that they feel good about the development of Penning and Young.

But if you overstate career threatening injuries to your star players, you are are not just lying, you are lying about your employees. How would you feel if your boss took you to a major industry conference and told all his competitors "Keith is probably retiring soon, he has a bad back, he can barely work, heck he is popping those pain pills so often I don't know if he is addicted or the surgeon left his scalpel in there?" While that could trick his competitors into thinking he would be hiring for your replacement soon when in fact he is looking to hire a totally different position, it would also be a lie that damages your reputation. If Ram's recovery is going great, I don't think he or his agent would want the head coach openly lying to the media and saying its going poorly, because that could damage Ram's reputation, his future marketability to other teams if the Saints ever move on, his negotiating leverage on future contracts since those would be based on his perceived market value to other teams, and his ability to garner endorsements, appearance fees, media employment, etc since a player who is damaged goods on the field is also less marketable off the field. If a team lies about how great a players recovery is going, the player and their agent may not mind, but if they go the other direction and overstate an injury as being career threatening when recovery is going great, that could create a lot of bad blood that makes the player less invested in the team.

Lying about a player also reduces trust with fans. Teams try hard to sell their moves to fans. When an injured players is restructured or extended, the team often tries to present their recovery process as going well. When a team chooses to release a player who is injured, they may overstate injury concerns if they simply cannot afford the player or don't like them in the scheme but they are a fan favorite. But too much lying to fans will create distrust. If Ram and Jordan are both ineffective this year, and Carr struggles with injury in 2024 but the team restructures and extends him anyway while giving glowing reports on his injury recovery, it may be hard to market season tickets in 2025 because fans may lose trust that any such glowing reports are real, and not want season tickets to Nathan Peterman.

Also in poker, if you always bluff, its less effective than if you bluff occasionally.

If a team is going to lie to deceive about its intentions in draft and free agency, it makes sense to do it more sparingly, and in a way that avoids blowback. If Ram is really recovering well, ****ting on his reputation in public would not be a good move. Even if he sees the advantage for the team, it would clearly hurt his reputation, leave him perceived by the league and fans as a Tua type who was a coin flip from retirement and is not worth investing in. If the team burned him that way and it was not true, he might start making noise about his contract after recovering, take plays off, or demand a trade.