Thoughts on Saturday night ...

-- The Cardinals don't usually take running backs in the first round. Over the last 30 years, Beanie Wells makes four – Ottis Anderson in 1979, Garrison Hearst in 1993 and Thomas Jones in 2000. Those guys all panned out (OK, Hearst and Jones had to go elsewhere to blossom but they still blossomed, right?). Like I said before, I think the Cards have the right pieces in place to make sure Wells works hard. I don't think anyone should be making snap judgments, and again, you don't have to when your team is picking 31st.

-- Cody Brown fits the profile of exactly the kind of player I expected the Cards to take for the their pass rushing linebacker of the future. Sure, a guy like Georgia Tech's Michael Johnson is still on the board, but when a mega-talented guy doesn't produce as much as he should and people question his effort, that may be the biggest red flag there is. You can't afford another second-rounder to fizzle out, a la Alan Branch.

-- Finally, there is Anquan Boldin. What a turn. When the Cards first came out last week to say they would listen to trade offers for Q, they said at the time they wanted to keep him around and were only keeping their options open. I certainly got the feeling Q was all but gone. What I never figured was that, for whatever reason, teams never really were willing to chase him. It creates a potential rocky situation, but there is no question it's got to be a sobering time for Boldin and agent Drew Rosenhaus, who early Saturday said he expected a trade and now finds himself with even less leverage than he had before all this happened. The Cardinals/Boldin marriage isn't ending anytime soon. Both sides need to try and find a way to repair the relationship. As Kurt Warner said to me last weekend, "For us to be everything we can be, everybody has got to be happy and everyone has to benefit from it. If that's not the case, than keeping it together just to keep it together doesn't necessarily pay dividends."

Can Boldin end up happy? It sure looks like he is going to end up staying in Arizona at least until the end of his current contract in 2010. The Cards could really use the non-grumpy Q to return. Money may be the only way to solve that, but that probably isn't immediately going to be available.