The story of Friday afternoon will be whoever stops the slide of Kentucky quarterback Will Levis, and I’ll get on my soapbox a little with this one.

The way I see it, the reality of his situation right now isn’t far off from where the league’s been on him all along. If you go back to my column on assessing the quarterback class through the eyes of NFL coaches, there were a few concerns through March and into April. If you’d asked me 10 days ago, I’d say a fall out of the first round was definitely possible.

Then, something weird happened. About a week ago, the narrative flipped. Suddenly the Colts, at No. 4, were connected to him by a number of teams I was talking to. Stories about the impression he made at the Manning Passing Academy made the rounds in NFL circles. I couldn’t remember a case like this one—where the way a top prospect was being talked about turned so quickly, without any sort of event happening to materially change things.

Turns out all that smoke was, well, just smoke. The truth remained where things were all along. The effort to change the narrative, wherever it came from, only made Levis’s fall seem like it was from the top of the Empire State building, when it may have been more accurate to characterize Thursday night as Levis stumbling off a step stool.

Which really sucks only for Levis himself.