Makai Lemon was left stunned after the Philadelphia Eagles traded up to select him in the NFL Draft – while he was already on the phone with the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The Steelers were preparing to draft Lemon out of USC with the No 21 pick when they were suddenly leapfrogged by the Eagles, who entered Thursday night’s first round with the No 23 pick.
That was until Philadelphia dramatically traded away both of their fourth-round selections to the Dallas Cowboys, who had the No 20 pick, in order to move up three spots and snatch the wide receiver from right under Pittsburgh’s noses.
In an astonishing moment, footage from the NFL Network shows Lemon speaking to Steelers general manager Omar Khan on the phone in the Draft room, before he asks his team: ‘Hey, why is Philly calling me?’
His agent then rushes over and tells him: ‘Philly just traded for you! This is Philly [on the phone]. They just traded for you.’
The late twist sparked frantic scenes in Lemon’s Draft room as both the player and his family struggled to keep up with the madness.
Makai Lemon was left stunned after the Eagles traded up to draft him while he was on the phone with the Steelers
The USC wide receiver was taken by Philadelphia with the No 20 pick in dramatic fashion
‘I answered the phone and it was the Steelers,’ Lemon said. ‘My phone kept ringing. I look and it was the Eagles. They traded up and they were going to pick me.
‘I feel like everything happened for a reason. They traded up, so it means a lot that they really wanted me.’
For Philly, the opportunity to land a player they expected to go in the top 10 was simply too good to pass up.
‘We kind of had a really good sense of who we thought the first 15 guys would be,’ Eagles GM Howie Roseman explained. ‘One of those guys did not go in the first 15, and he was available to us.
‘So I think for us, when we saw that, it was just trying to figure out where we can move up.’
When asked about the dramatic moment they stole him from Pittsburgh, Roseman said: ‘When we get on the clock, we immediately try to contact the player. It took us a couple minutes to contact the player and get him on the phone. That hasn’t happened very often.
‘The clock got down a little bit lower than we would have liked but we were able to get in touch with him and obviously select him.’
The Eagles selected Lemon with the 20th pick after sliding up to get a top wideout with AJ Brown on the trading block.
Lemon’s evening at the NFL Draft proved a rollercoaster as he went from Pittsburgh to Philly
The Eagles considered Lemon a top-15 pick and were surprised to see him slide down to 20th
Brown is likely on the move, with the New England Patriots expected to be the leading contender to land the Pro Bowl receiver, reuniting him with embattled coach Mike Vrabel, who had him in Tennessee.
The Los Angeles Rams already pursued him earlier in the offseason. The Eagles would be able to spread a $40million salary cap hit over two seasons by waiting until June 1 to deal Brown.
Lemon won the Biletnikoff Award as the nation’s top receiver this season after catching 79 passes for 1,156 yards – tops in the Power Four conferences – and 11 touchdowns for the Trojans.
The 5-foot-11 wideout with a knack for acrobatic catches and game-changing plays grew up 25 miles from USC’s campus in Orange County. After playing sparingly as a freshman in 2023, he caught 131 passes for 1,928 yards and 14 TDs during his two full seasons with the Trojans.
