"Okay, but at this point, all the GM is guilty of is not going along with the consensus. How dare he!
He won't be vindicated nor his stupidity confirmed for years, so this knee-jerk criticism is silly."
That I can't properly quote this for some reason is annoying, but it sort of half true.
He's guilty of following the old consensus and doing so very aggressively. He picked a QB who looks like a QB, who is tall, built and a few ticks more athletic than average. The guy has the blessing of one of the best QB minds in the business, which is something shortsighted GMs love. They also got to watch him in practice and just loved how he practiced.
But he's also a guy who didn't play football particularly well, either by the numerical indicators or the eye test. Now perhaps it's a stroke of genius. Perhaps there's something in the not playing football well that was actually really good. But you'll catch some flack for that.
Now the second part is when he was taken. That, and the ensuing explanation, suggest he was not going along with the consensus. If Jones was not valued by consensus, he would've been available later on. So that could be value lost. The GM insists he would've been gone by the 17th pick. So in that sense, the GM was just the most aggressive in working within the consensus. (The same way someone ends up paying the big NBA deal we all know isn't wise)
Now it's also true the larger talking-head-dom is taking on a more new-age approach, and that's turned against the "Take a QB with traits and we can make him into a thing" camp. That's because those QBs had a massive failure rate. Granted, all QBs have a stupendous failure rate.
Maybe he ends up Matt Ryan, who was kinda overdrafted and ended up quite good. But at the moment people need thoughts. Shoot, we got em in the middle of a game about a specific play, why not now?