Culture
Post-NFL Draft Power Rankings: Bears rise, Falcons slide and Chiefs still reign
The NFL Draft is complete, which means the country’s most dominant sports league will now take a short break from dominating television ratings and the athletic world’s oxygen (no offense to Schedule Release Day or the social media teams that work so hard to make that fun). But before we get started on summer, the Power Rankings will assess where everyone stands after their rookie additions.
Post-free agency rank: 1
Dane Brugler’s draft ranking: 13
The Chiefs have managed to muddle through just fine in the two seasons since trading Tyreek Hill to the Dolphins. In fact, they’ve won two Super Bowls. Still, they seem to have decided a three-peat might be easier with another jet-pack wide receiver. That’s why they traded up for Texas wide receiver Xavier Worthy, who ran the fastest 40-yard dash in NFL combine history (4.21).
Post-free agency rank: 2
Brugler’s draft ranking: 25
Did the 49ers take Florida wide receiver Ricky Pearsall because they plan to trade Brandon Aiyuk or Deebo Samuel? Or did they did do it because coach Kyle Shanahan just wants another tough-as-nails wide receiver to terrorize defenses? We don’t know yet, but they did strengthen their defense with two defensive backs (Renardo Green and Malik Mustapha) who will help right away.
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Post-free agency rank: 3
Brugler’s draft ranking: 3
Detroit was 28th last season in defensive passing EPA so it used its first two picks on cornerbacks. Sensible enough. Then the Lions returned to their contrarian form by using their third pick (a fourth-rounder, which they acquired by trading away a 2025 third-rounder) on a Tongan offensive tackle from Canada (Giovanni Manu) whom Brugler projected as a priority free agent. That’s the wacky Brad Holmes-Dan Campbell Lions we’ve come to love here.
The Ravens know what they’re doing in the draft, and second-round pick Roger Rosengarten will fit right in. (Ken Murray / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Post-free agency rank: 6
Brugler’s draft ranking: 12
Baltimore did Baltimore things in the draft, stockpiling players at premium positions up and down the board. The beauty of the Ravens’ approach is they never seem to need immediate help. This is still the team that led the NFL in point margin last year (plus-203). Second-round offensive tackle Roger Rosengarten could end up being one of the steals of the draft.
Post-free agency rank: 4
Brugler’s draft ranking: 28
The Texans added a lot of players (nine) but nobody who is expected to move the needle much this season. Having no first-round pick this year is the price they paid for wheeling and dealing in last year’s draft. It’s a price they were happy to pay considering they got quarterback C.J. Stroud and edge Will Anderson Jr. in that draft, which is why they’re still high on this list.
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Post-free agency rank: 5
Brugler’s draft ranking: 21
While everyone’s draft focus was on the Falcons saying they were trying to turbocharge the Packers’ quarterback succession model, Green Bay might have quietly done it again. The Packers picked Tulane quarterback Michael Pratt in the seventh round. The 6-foot-3, 217-pound Pratt might have to wait a long time if he’s going to succeed Jordan Love, but he’s more than worth the gamble at pick No. 245 after starting 44 college games and throwing 90 career touchdowns.
Post-free agency rank: 9
Brugler’s draft ranking: 10
For 51 weeks of the year, it feels like the Cowboys are all over the map. Somebody, usually the owner, is saying quizzical things. Expectations are being elevated and then left unmet. And then comes draft week, and Cowboys just quietly go about doing a very good job. It’s why they get away with all the other stuff. Dallas got value with all three of its top picks, and second-round edge rusher Marshawn Kneeland could be a star. (Adding back Ezekiel Elliott in free agency doesn’t move the needle much at this point.)
Post-free agency rank: 7
Brugler’s draft ranking: 30
It’s tough to add much help when your first pick is at No. 54, but Cleveland was still paying bills from the Deshaun Watson trade. The good news is that trade is now officially complete, and the Browns will have a first-round draft pick in 2025 for the first time since 2021. Unless, of course, they make another deal.
Post-free agency rank: 8
Brugler’s draft ranking: 18
Let’s take a moment to visualize Cincinnati’s dream offensive line of the future. The Bengals used their first-round pick on 6-8, 340-pound Amarius Mims even though Mims made only eight college starts. Cincinnati already has 6-8, 345-pound Orlando Brown Jr. entrenched at left tackle and 6-8, 355-pound Trent Brown penciled in on the right side on a one-year contract. It’s possible Mims won’t start this season, but if he does, it will be fun to watch.
Wide receiver Keon Coleman is a key addition for Josh Allen and the Bills, who no longer have Stefon Diggs and Gabe Davis. (Don Juan Moore / Getty Images)
Post-free agency rank: 10
Brugler’s draft ranking: 20
The draft was another reminder that the Bills are in a controlled rebuild. They traded all the way out of the first round to add more affordable assets to the roster. The good news is they still came away with a pretty good receiver with their first pick, taking Florida State’s Keon Coleman with the first choice of the second round. If Coleman can develop a quick connection with Josh Allen, it will go a long way toward stabilizing Buffalo’s reset.
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Post-free agency rank: 16
Brugler’s draft ranking: 4
After grabbing two of the top corners early in the draft, Philadelphia added some potential high-reward players in Round 3 and later. Edge rusher Jalyx Hunt out of Houston Christian (6-4, 252 pounds) is a perfect example. Hunt started his career as an Ivy League safety, but he had the fifth-longest arms of any edge rusher in this class and is an explosive athlete who could turn into a steal.
Post-free agency rank: 11
Brugler’s draft ranking: 24
Jared Verse must feel special. That’s whom Los Angeles picked with its first first-round pick since 2016 (which it spent on Jared Goff). Verse, and his former Florida State teammate Braden Fiske, a defensive tackle, will help a defense that finished 22nd last year in points allowed (22.2). Now if they can keep quarterback Matthew Stafford happy (he wants a contract adjustment with more guaranteed money, NFL Network reported during the draft), they’ll be a sleeper NFC title game candidate.
Post-free agency rank: 23
Brugler’s draft ranking: 1
No one moved up more in this edition of the Power Rankings than the Bears, who drafted uber-talented quarterback Caleb Williams with the No. 1 pick and elite wide receiver prospect Rome Odunze with the No. 9 pick. They made only five draft picks, but that’s not doing anything to slow down expectations in Chicago. The Bears have one division title in the last 13 years, but they’re expected to be true challengers to the Lions and Packers this year.
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Post-free agency rank: 14
Brugler’s draft ranking: 14
The Colts landed two of the draft’s most talented players with their first two picks, which is impressive considering those picks came at 15 and 52. They did have to take on some risk to do it, though. UCLA edge rusher Laiatu Latu medically retired from football at one point in his college career, and Texas wide receiver Adonai Mitchell raised some concerns about non-football issues in the scouting community. (Don’t tell GM Chris Ballard about that second part, though. He doesn’t want to hear it.)
Colts GM Chris Ballard was preachin’ about the pre-draft reports on AD Mitchell 🗣️pic.twitter.com/KqyJFwsLY8
— Jon Tweets Sports (@jontweetssports) April 27, 2024
Post-free agency rank: 12
Brugler’s draft ranking: 22
Jason Licht might be the NFL’s poster boy for patience. Licht has been the Buccaneers’ general manager since 2014. In four of his first five seasons, Tampa Bay finished last in the NFC South. Now the Bucs have won the division three years in a row, and Licht seems to keep bringing in good players. This year, he got every analyst’s favorite under-the-radar offensive lineman, Duke’s Graham Barton.
Post-free agency rank: 13
Brugler’s draft ranking: 23
Mike McDaniel is committed to the bit. The head coach of the NFL’s fastest team traded up to take the second-fastest running back in this year’s draft in Round 4 (Tennessee’s Jaylen Wright) and then drafted a high school sprinting state champion — Virginia wide receiver Malik Washington — in the fifth round. Give him credit, too, for getting big guys in the first two rounds in edge Chop Robinson and offensive tackle Patrick Paul.
Post-free agency rank: 15
Brugler’s draft ranking: 17
The Jets drafted an Aaron Rodgers support staff, getting offensive tackle Olu Fashanu, wide receiver Malachi Corley and running back Braelon Allen with their first three picks. Fashanu might not start right away, but he has that kind of talent, and Corley should join Mike Williams and Garrett Wilson in the starting lineup immediately.
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Post-free agency rank: 22
Brugler’s draft ranking: 2
Whoever ends up playing quarterback for the Steelers (Russell Wilson and Justin Fields are the contenders, in case you hadn’t heard), he should have plenty of protection. Pittsburgh took three offensive linemen, including two of the feistiest in this draft (tackle Troy Fautanu and center Zach Frazier), with their first two picks.
Post-free agency rank: 18
Brugler’s draft ranking: 16
Seattle’s first two picks weigh a combined 614 pounds, so we know general manager John Schneider, in his first draft post-Pete Carroll, wanted to rebuild the Seahawks’ trenches. Defensive tackle Bryron Murphy II (6-foot, 297 pounds) might end up being the best defensive player in this draft, and guard Christian Haynes (6-3, 317) will provide immediate offensive line depth and a possible Day 1 starter.
If quarterback J.J. McCarthy is as good as the Vikings believe he is, they’ll be in great shape. (Rick Osentoski / USA Today)
Post-free agency rank: 19
Brugler’s draft ranking: 15
If J.J. McCarthy is as good as (or even close to as good as) Kirk Cousins, the Vikings will have had the best draft of the year. If he’s not the guy, then Minnesota will have let a solid veteran quarterback leave and then expended a lot of draft assets only to fail to answer the quarterback question. Getting Alabama edge Dallas Turner at No. 17 is a nice touch either way.
Post-free agency rank: 26
Brugler’s draft ranking: 6
Jim Harbaugh stuck to his guns. After saying for weeks leading up to the draft that his team placed a premium on offensive linemen, he passed on two elite wide receiver prospects (Malik Nabers and Rome Odunze) to take offensive tackle Joe Alt fifth. “Offensive linemen we look at as weapons,” Harbaugh said. “Offensive line is the tip of the spear.”
Post-free agency rank: 17
Brugler’s draft ranking: 32
The talk of the draft, but not for the right reasons, the Falcons passed on their best chance to make the 2024 team better by drafting quarterback Michael Penix Jr. with the No. 8 pick. It might turn out to be a genius move for the future, but it won’t help this year with Penix sitting behind Kirk Cousins. The five front-seven defenders they drafted after Penix might help, though.
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Post-free agency rank: 28
Brugler’s draft ranking: 9
The Commanders completed their extreme home makeover (the owner, general manager and head coach are all brand new) with their quarterback of the future. At least, that’s the hope. Former LSU quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Jayden Daniels was the most physically dynamic quarterback on the board, but he does not come without risk. Should be a fun season in Washington, which would be new, too.
Post-free agency rank: 29
Brugler’s draft ranking: 8
The Patriots had the good fortune to be picking third in a draft that had three highly regarded quarterback prospects. And they had the good sense to simply take North Carolina’s Drake Maye instead of trading the pick. New England signed Jacoby Brissett in free agency, so it can afford to give Maye plenty of time to get ready before throwing him into an offense that isn’t good enough to help him as a rookie.
Post-free agency rank: 21
Brugler’s draft ranking: 11
The Raiders were rumored to be in the quarterback trade market but stayed in their draft slot and took the best player available — Georgia tight end Brock Bowers. It was a very un-Vegas move. Then they compounded the common sense by taking offensive linemen with their next two picks.
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Post-free agency rank: 20
Brugler’s draft ranking: 29
The Jaguars like LSU players, and they don’t much care what everyone else thinks of their new players. Jacksonville started the draft by taking wide receiver Brian Thomas Jr., the first of three Tigers it drafted. The next eight players all ranked among some of the biggest reaches in the draft based on consensus mock draft rankings.
Wide receiver Malik Nabers should give Daniel Jones and the Giants offense an immediate boost. (John Korduner / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Post-free agency rank: 27
Brugler’s draft ranking: 7
The Giants passed on an opportunity to get out of the Daniel Jones business and really shake up the draft by taking a quarterback with the sixth pick. Instead, they went with dynamic wide receiver Malik Nabers in hopes he’ll help lift Jones to another level. If that doesn’t work, New York can exit Jones’ contract pretty easily after this year. It did bring in Drew Lock as a veteran contingency plan.
Post-free agency rank: 24
Brugler’s draft ranking: 26
The Titans got bigger in the draft. A lot bigger, using their first pick on 342-pound offensive tackle JC Latham and their second pick on 366-pound defensive tackle T’Vondre Sweat. The Sweat pick in the second round (No. 38) raised eyebrows because he wasn’t expected to go nearly that high, but if he matures and can keep his weight in check, he could be a superstar. Latham is expected to be a Day 1 starter.
Post-free agency rank: 31
Brugler’s draft ranking: 5
This was the draft Arizona had been waiting for. The Cardinals had seven of the first 90 picks. Teams generally hope to get at least starting-quality players out of that type of draft capital. If Arizona did that, its turnaround could begin now.
Post-free agency rank: 30
Brugler’s draft ranking: 19
The Saints might have stumbled into their next starting quarterback … or into a quarterback controversy. New Orleans drafted South Carolina’s Spencer Rattler with the 150th pick. Given current starter Derek Carr’s sometimes shaky hold on the job and Rattler’s NFL arm, Saints fans might be calling for a change by midseason.
Post-free agency rank: 25
Brugler’s draft ranking: 31
The Falcons’ quarterback selection kept Denver off the national hot seat. The Broncos took Oregon quarterback Bo Nix at No. 12, which was 32 spots higher than The Athletic’s Dane Brugler had him ranked. If it works, Sean Payton can turn Denver around quickly. If it doesn’t, it’ll be another in a series of very curious Broncos moves.
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Post-free agency rank: 32
Brugler’s draft ranking: 27
Owner David Tepper stole the show again. And, again, not in a good way. Tepper turned the draft weekend narrative on himself when he stopped at a local bar to question the owner about a snarky sign out front. There’s a reason Carolina has occupied this spot in the rankings for so long.
(Top photo of Caleb Williams: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
SELLING OPPORTUNITY: The Story of Mary Kay, by Mary Lisa Gavenas
Mary Kay, the cosmetics company whose multilevel marketing included sales parties and whose biggest earners were awarded pink Cadillacs, was really in the business of selling second chances. Or, at least, that’s what Mary Lisa Gavenas argues in “Selling Opportunity,” a dual biography of the brand and the woman behind it.
Mary Kathlyn Wagner, who would become Mary Kay Ash, “the most famous saleswoman in the world” and “maybe the most famous ever,” in Gavenas’s extravagant words, was born in 1918 to a poor family and raised mostly in Houston. Although a good student, she eloped at 16 with a slightly older boy. The young couple had two babies in quick succession.
Mary Kay’s creation was a combination of timing and good luck. Door-to-door sales was a thriving industry — but, traditionally, a man’s world: Lugging heavy samples was not considered feminine, and entering the homes of strangers, unsafe. But things began to change during the Great Depression, Gavenas suggests, thanks to a convergence of factors — financial pressures and the rise of the aspirational prosperity gospel espoused by Dale Carnegie’s self-help manuals.
At the same time, female-run beauty lines like Annie Turnbo Malone’s Poro and Madam C.J. Walker’s were finding great success in Black communities. And, coincidentally or otherwise, the California Perfume Company changed its name to Avon Products in 1939.
Ash began by selling books door to door, moving on to Stanley Home Products in the 1940s. She was talented, but direct sales was a rough gig. Every party to show off wares was supposed to beget two more bookings; these led to sales that resulted in new recruits. But there was no real security or stability: no salary, no medical benefits, no vacations. “Stop selling and you would end up right back where you started. Or worse,” the author writes.
Gavenas, a onetime beauty editor who wrote “Color Stories,” takes her time unspooling Mary Kay’s tale, with a great deal of evident research. We learn about direct sales, women’s rights and Texas history.
But, be warned: Readers must really enjoy both this woman and this world to take pleasure in “Selling Opportunity.” Mary Kay the person keeps marrying, getting divorced or widowed and working her way through various sales jobs (it’s hard to keep track of the myriad companies and last names). Gavenas seems to leave no detail out. Thus, the 1963 founding of the eponymous beauty company doesn’t come until almost 200 pages in.
Beauty by Mary Kay included a Cleansing Cream, a Magic Masque and a Nite Cream (which containined ammoniated mercury, later banned by the F.D.A.). The full line of products — which was how Mary Kay strongly encouraged customers to buy them — ran to a steep $175 in today’s money. (To fail to acquire the whole set, Ash said, was “like giving you my recipe for chocolate cake but leaving out an important ingredient.”)
Potential clients attended gatherings at acquaintances’ homes — no undignified doorbell-ringing here — where they received a mini facial, then an application of cosmetics like foundation, lip color and cream rouge — and a wig. The company made $198,514 in sales its first year.
Although Ash may have seemed a pioneer, in many ways Mary Kay was a traditionalist company, whose philosophy was “God first, family second, career third.” Saleswomen, official literature dictated, were working to provide themselves with treats rather than necessities so as not to threaten their breadwinner husbands.
And yet, they were also encouraged to sell sell sell. Golden Goblet pendants were awarded for major orders. After the company started using custom pink Peterbilt trucks for shipping, it began commissioning those Cadillacs for top consultants. (Mary Kay preferred gifts to cash bonuses, lest women save the money to spend on practical things rather than the licensed frivolities.) The Cadillacs, always driven on company leases, would become industry legend and part of American pop culture lore. “Never to be run-down, repainted or resold, the cars would double as shining pink advertisements for her selling opportunity,” Gavenas writes.
The woman herself was iconic, too. While Ash was a product of the Depression, she was also undeniably over-the-top. She wore white suits with leopard trim, lived in a custom Frank L. Meier house and brought her poodle to the office.
Mary Kay went public in 1968, making her the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange. By the 1990s, the Mary Kay headquarters near Dallas was almost 600,000 square feet. They commissioned a hagiographic company biopic; there was a Mary Kay consultant Barbie; they were making $1 billion in wholesale. When she died, in 2001, Ash was worth $98 million.
And yet, Gavenas cites that at the company’s height, in 1992, sales reps made on average just $2,400 per year.
Instead of so much time in the pink fantasia of Mary Kay, it would have been nice for a few detours showing how infrequently the opportunities the company sold were truly realized.
SELLING OPPORTUNITY: The Story of Mary Kay | By Mary Lisa Gavenas | Viking | 435 pp. | $35
We often think of the past as if it were another world — and in some ways, it is. The politics, religion and social customs of other eras can be vastly different from our own. But one thing historians and historical fiction writers alike often notice is the constancy of human emotion. The righteous anger of a customer complaining about a Mesopotamian copper merchant in 1750 B.C. feels familiar. Tributes to beloved household pets from ancient Romans and Egyptians make us smile. And we are captivated by stories of love, betrayal and sacrifice from Homer to Shakespeare and beyond.
In literature, letters, tablets and even on coins, we find overwhelming evidence that people in the past felt the same emotions we do. Love, hate, fear, grief, joy: These feelings were as much a part of their lives as they are of our own. And they resonate especially acutely in the bond between mother and child. Here are eight historical novels that explore the meaning of motherhood across the centuries.
Sometime in the 2000s, the producer Lindsay Doran asked her doctor for a book recommendation. “I’m reading that book everybody’s reading,” the doctor replied. “You know, the one about the shepherd who’s murdered and the sheep solve the crime.”
Doran had not heard of the book, “Three Bags Full,” a best-selling novel by a German graduate student (“No one’s reading it,” she recalls responding, inaccurately), but she was struck by what sounded like an irresistible elevator pitch. “Everything came together for me in that one sentence,” she said. “The fact that it was sheep rather than some other animal felt so resonant.”
Doran spent years trying to extricate the book from a complicated rights situation, and years more turning it into a movie. The result, opening Friday, is “The Sheep Detectives,” which features Nicholas Braun and Emma Thompson as humans, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Patrick Stewart and others giving voice to C.G.I. sheep stirred from their customary ruminations by the death of their shepherd, George (Hugh Jackman).
The film, rated PG, is an Agatha Christie-lite mystery with eccentric suspects, a comically bumbling cop (Braun) and a passel of ovine investigators. It’s also a coming-of-age story about growing up and losing your innocence that might have a “Bambi”-like resonance for children. The movie’s sheep have a way of erasing unpleasant things from their minds — they believe, for instance, that instead of dying, they just turn into clouds — but learn that death is an inextricable part of life.
“In some ways, the most important character is Mopple, the sheep played by Chris O’Dowd,” the screenwriter, Craig Mazin, said in a video interview. “He has a defect — he does not know how to forget — and he’s been carrying his memories all alone.”
“Three Bags Full” is an adult novel that includes grown-up themes like drugs and suicide. In adapting it for a younger audience, Mazin toned down its darker elements, changed its ending, and — for help in writing about death — consulted a book by Fred Rogers, TV’s Mister Rogers, about how to talk to children about difficult subjects.
The journey from book to film has been long and circuitous. “Three Bags Full” was written by Leonie Swann, then a 20-something German doctoral student studying English literature. Distracting herself from her unwritten dissertation, on the topic of “the animal point of view in fiction,” she began a short story “playing around with the idea of sheep detectives,” she said. “And I realized it was more like a novel, and it wasn’t the worst novel I’d ever seen.”
Why sheep? “I wasn’t someone who was thinking about sheep all the time,” Swann, who lives in the English countryside and has a dog named Ezra Hound, said in a video interview. Yet they have always hovered on the periphery of her life.
There was a friendly sheep that she used to see on her way to school. There was an irate ram that once chased her through the streets of a Bavarian village. And there were thousands and thousands of sheep in the fields of Ireland, where she lived for a time. “There were so many of them, and you could tell there was a lot of personality behind them,” she said.
A book in which sheep are stirred to action had to be a mystery, she said, to motivate the main characters. “In a lot of other stories, you would have trouble making a sheep realize there’s a story there,” she said. “They would just keep grazing. But murder is an existential problem that speaks to sheep as well as humans.”
Swann (the name is a pseudonym; she has never publicly disclosed her real name) found a literary agent, Astrid Poppenhusen, who brought her manuscript to market. Published in 2005, the book was translated into 30 languages and ended up spending three and a half years on German best-seller lists. (The German title is “Glennkill,” after the village in which it takes place.) Other novels followed, including a sheep-centric sequel, “Big Bad Wool,” but Swann never finished her dissertation.
Doran, the producer, read the book — now published in the United States by Soho Press, along with four other Swann novels — soon after hearing about it. She was determined to make it into a movie. Whenever she told anyone about the idea, she said, she had them at “sheep.”
The director, Kyle Balda (whose credits include “Minions”), was so excited when he first read the script, in 2022, that “I immediately drove out to a sheep farm” near his house in Oregon, he said in a video interview. “Very instantly I could see the behavior of the sheep, their different personalities. I learned very quickly that there are more varieties of sheep than dogs.”
How to make the sheep look realistic, and how to strike the proper balance between their inherent sheep-iness and their human-esque emotions were important questions the filmmakers grappled with.
It was essential that “the sheep in this world are sheep” rather than humans in sheep’s clothing, Balda said. “It’s not the kind of story where they are partnered with humans and talking to each other.”
That means that like real sheep, the movie sheep have short attention spans. They’re afraid to cross the road. “They don’t drive cars; they don’t wear pants; they’re not joke characters saying things like, ‘This grass would taste better with a little ranch dressing,’” Doran said.
And whenever they speak, their words register to humans as bleating, the way the adult speech in “Peanuts” cartoons sounds like trombone-y gibberish to Charlie Brown and his friends.
Lily, the leader of the flock, is played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. It is not her first time voicing an animal in a movie: She has played, among other creatures, an ant in “A Bug’s Life” and a horse in “Animal Farm.” “When I read the script, I thought, ‘Wow, this is so weird,’” she said in a video interview. “It’s not derivative of anything else.”
Lily is unquestionably not a person; among other things, like a real sheep, she has a relatively immobile face set off by lively ears. “But her journey is a human journey where she realizes certain things about life she didn’t understand,” Louis-Dreyfus said. “There’s also the question of being a leader, and how to do that when you’re questioning your own point of view.”
Nicholas Braun took easily to the role of Officer Tim, the inept constable charged with solving the shepherd’s murder.
“The part was a little Greg-adjacent in the beginning, and I don’t really want to play too many Gregs,” Braun said via video, referring to Cousin Greg, his hapless punching bag of a character in the TV drama “Succession.”
“I’m post-Greg,” he said.
It takes Officer Tim some time to notice that the neighborhood sheep might be actively helping him tackle the case. But Braun said that unlike Greg, who is stuck in perpetual ineptitude, Tim gets to grow into a braver and more assertive person, a take-charge romantic hero — much the way the sheep are forced into action from their default position of “just forgetting about it and moving on and going back to eating grass,” he said.
Braun mused for a bit about other potential animal detectives — horses, say, or cows — but concluded that the sheep in the film were just right for the job. He predicted that the movie would change people’s perception of sheep, much the way “Toy Story” made them “look at their toys, or their kids’ toys, differently.”
“I don’t think people are going to be eating as much lamb after this,” he said.,
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