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‘Finding Rams’: One year behind the scenes of the NFL Draft scouting process, Part I

Jourdan Rodrigue

https://theathletic.com/5461276/2024/05/02/nfl-draft-scouting-process-rams-behind-the-scenes/?source=emp_shared_article

HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. — On the opening night of the 2024 NFL Draft, the Los Angeles Rams decided to wait eight of their allotted 10 minutes on the clock before submitting their selection to the league.

It had been eight years since the franchise’s previous first-round pick. Eight minutes felt symbolic.

L.A. would take Florida State outside linebacker Jared Verse at No. 19. And for every selection, there’s a phone call from the general manager.

“Hey, Jared, this is Les Snead, Los Angeles Rams …”

Snead’s call is a beginning and an end. Months spent by the scouts on research, evaluation, discussions and debate are over. Whether a player succeeds or fails now depends on a number of variables, some that will come to reflect upon the scouting process and some that are out of evaluators’ hands entirely.

And less than two hours after this year’s draft ended, Rams scouts had a list of 2025 prospects emailed to them, the onset of their process all over again.

Over the last 10 months, The Athletic was granted access inside the team’s scouting and draft operation — from shadowing scouts on school visits and all-star events to sitting in on the internal meetings that shaped the team’s draft board and attending the beachside mansion where they held their draft. Some details do not include identifiers to protect the competitive nature of the process.

They call it “finding Rams.”

During his first interview with The Athletic, Rams senior personnel executive Taylor Morton looked out the back window of his Florida home and realized he had to set the phone down for a moment. “Call you right back,” he said in a relaxed drawl. “There’s an alligator in my backyard.”

Scout enough years and nothing rattles a person.

Morton met Snead almost 25 years ago at Auburn. They’ve stuck together since, launching their pro careers in the Atlanta Falcons’ personnel department, where they bonded more closely via the trials of lives spent on the road.

One year, on a scouting trip in the Southeast, their car blew a tire on the highway. Neither could figure out how to attach the spare. Sweating, furious and past due for their appointment, Snead grabbed the intact tire and heaved it into a thicket of brush next to the road. They laugh about it now, and when the two reminisce, people have a hard time telling their voices apart.

Morton joined Snead again in St. Louis when Snead became GM of the Rams in 2012, before the team moved back to L.A. in 2016. He is one of six evaluators with the “senior personnel executive” title who are known informally as “over-the-top” scouts (OTT). Each region of the country also has an “area” scout who builds profiles and evaluations of the players over multiple years, flying under the radar at games, practices and pro days.

From May to July, the scouting staff puts together an initial list of about 200 prospects for OTT scouts to “cross-check” from September through November — about 20 per week — to supplement the work of the area scouts. Other players are added as the process continues.

The two groups of scouts, plus analysts and consultants, make up a staff of 25. Many have been together for a decade or longer, and the continuity has led to a shared language that helps move them through evaluations and in and out of debates.

The Rams allow their scouts to live in their respective evaluation areas. Snead, Morton and director of scouting James Gladstone believe the literal distance between them for most of the year discourages “groupthink”; Morton also believes remote work increases productivity and generally sticks to the Southeast for any in-person college visits during his cross-checks.

He has done this for a quarter-century and knows that each school merits a different approach. The evening before his visit to a Division I program in early September, Morton connected with the area scout to refresh his information about the two players he wanted to get a closer look at. The area scout also flagged a few others who might eventually make the Rams’ list.

The day started in the early morning hours at the pastry window of a local Starbucks. Morton ordered a bag full of assorted baked goods to be presented to the assistant at the front desk of the program’s coaching offices. Years ago, before college film was widely available to watch on personal computers, these pastries probably would have gotten Morton first dibs on the remote in the school’s film room — the other NFL scouts in attendance would have had to defer to how he wanted to watch tape.

Now, the pastries are both a small gesture of kindness — Morton remembers certain favorites — and a signal: when they are set out at the desk, sources in the building know to find him and give him a tidbit or two about one of the players he’s evaluating.

“They don’t have to accommodate us,” Morton said. “Our business is all about relationships.”

Some schools are finicky about the level of access provided to scouts, whether from paranoia about information-sharing or simply because they want players focused on the season ahead. But this particular program allowed Morton a full-access visit, including a practice viewing, alongside a handful of other scouts.

Most college football programs have a pro liaison who is authorized to discuss draft-eligible players with visiting scouts. Scouts keep almost as many notes on that liaison and the amount and quality of information provided as they do on prospects themselves. The liaison set Morton up in a private room and logged into the school’s film system as Morton fired up his iPad and got comfortable with the toggles on the remote.

Morton had already watched tape on these prospects, but his presence in that particular room served another purpose. College staffers quietly rotated through as Morton asked questions about schemes, personalities, practice and study habits. He has a rule: Never criticize a player’s tape in front of a coach or staff member but certainly listen if they have their own critiques.

Other scouts underwent the same process in separate rooms throughout the football building. By lunchtime, they all convened in Morton’s room and waited for the pro liaison to join. Many knew each other — one had a lighthearted but unprintable nickname for Morton — and they caught up on families and travels.

They shared more unwritten rules similar to Morton’s: Don’t abuse the liaison’s time by asking about underclassmen. Don’t go to the school in person if it’s obvious only one player is drawing interest. Don’t make coaches uncomfortable or paranoid. Don’t visit your alma mater’s rival during rivalry game weeks. Stay at hotels with free breakfast, fill an insulated coffee cup with eggs and bacon and bring it to the school to consume mid-morning.

Background checks with the pro liaison and the strength coach started in the early afternoon. The scouts sat around a large table with the pro liaison at the head and got out their tablets. One veteran scout instead used a paper notepad and two different-colored pens.

Most NFL teams have a data and information processing system, usually constructed in-house, into which scouts, coaches, medical staff, front office executives and others input notes on players. The Rams’ is JAARS, “Joint After-Action Review System,” built a little over a decade ago by director of data and analytics Jake Temme and analyst Ryan Garlisch. Before JAARS, the Rams used magnets on a giant whiteboard.

Once purely an information-storing program to help keep team personnel organized, the constantly updated JAARS now helps the Rams build out and combine hundreds of thousands of data points that form the DNA strands of any one prospect’s profile. And its value lies not only in its player data — JAARS is the keeper of an entire language. Some Rams staffers joke that the system will eventually need a new, more human-sounding acronym to reflect its approaching sentience.

Morton added his notes from the pro liaison and strength coach to the corresponding JAARS profiles in a shorthand that included colors and emojis. The strength coach had the deepest insight into any of the draft prospects. He and his staff spend the most time with them throughout the year, and he discussed everything from practice and training habits to whether a player’s frame could handle more weight or subtract it and how teammates interacted with each other — lots of details Morton could use.

The scouts pressed the strength coach on specifics — among Morton’s favorite questions is, “Do you trust (the player)?” — then scheduled individual meetings with position coaches for after practice. They spent practice on the sideline. Morton roamed up and down the field, quietly meeting with support staff and hardly reacting as they told him things, which encouraged them to tell him more.

Morton’s wife, Carissa, joins him on trips when her schedule allows, and this visit ended with dinner at a local spot they both knew from years of travel. He filed his last notes into JAARS before the drive to the next college. Four days later, the Rams’ regular season began in Seattle.

On Fridays in late October and early November, as OTT scouts finished their cross-checks, they also held position meetings with the idea of eventually creating a consensus “top 15” per position. Until April, that list is very malleable. Round-by-round projections or grades are never assigned.

Gladstone, the scouting director; Temme, the director of data and analytics; and scouting strategist Nicole Blake are on every Zoom call. So is Snead, but he tries to speak or react very little. The point of the meetings is to get OTT scouts discussing players as candidly as possible, and Snead believes that having “the boss” responding to debates or presentations introduces a subconscious bias to identify prospects he might like.

Gladstone, a former high school teacher and football coach in St. Louis with an MBA in education administration, runs all of the draft-related meetings — even when Snead is in them. He sees the reports and data entered by scouts and analysts, then selects certain threads to pull or people to call on for more information or even debate. Sometimes Gladstone is a conductor. Sometimes he is an instigator.

“The way we operate in meetings is a passion project of mine,” he said.

Scouts viewed Gladstone’s shared screen as he moved through 20 prospects. Every time JAARS is opened in full, an enormous amount of information is on display — a detailed language predicated on visual cues. Each player profile features his college headshot and a long row of tabs that can be individually expanded.

JAARS tabs, which have movable sliding scales, contain information on anything from character and mental assessments to medical history, athletic testing results and the composite scores built by weighing the different results together. The number of total tabs along a row varies by position — some weigh over a dozen different physical traits.

There is a section where staff can easily access film cut-ups and a section for “chatter” — leaks, agent-driven reports, videos of workouts shared on social media, quotes from news conferences and more. There is also a section for anonymous surveys, created by Temme and Blake, that gather a variety of opinions from scouts after each position evaluation to help the group better understand its consensus or disagreements.

Consensus opinions of prospects’ top strengths are “superpowers,” while weaknesses are “kryptonite.” A section called “the wisdom of the crowd” references group opinions or collective findings.

A JAARS tab’s color gradient quickly shows where a player currently sits in terms of production, testing, medical checks or in scouts’ opinions. Outlier colors more easily catch scouts’ eyes when absorbing massive amounts of information. Blue, red and maroon are favorable; green and purple, less so.

Those colored tabs can also be stamped with “badges” (emojis), which represent evolving sentiment — fire and sun symbols signify favorable evaluations while an icicle or snowflake means a scout is cooling on the prospect. On the far side of the row, scouts can also assign a player different badges to quickly describe other traits, from a brain emoji to a beaker or set of glasses, a medical cross, a flexing arm, an hourglass, a dynamite blast and dozens more.

Scouts stamp badges and change colors on prospects throughout the entire year. Spoken as a language, it sounds something like this: “(OTT scout) has a maroon hot on (name) after a health flag was cleared up by two school sources — no longer snowy, and medical badge was removed.”

JAARS reflects both Snead’s decades-long tenure as a scout and his rejection of many of the profession’s archetypal practices. Scouting reports used to be hundreds — if not thousands — of words long apiece. Snead grew to hate scouting language and terminology and loathed reading the lengthy reports almost as much as scouts did writing them. Eventually, scouts do compose a “one-liner” that summarizes their general sentiment of a player beyond the colors and shapes — but even those reflect an entrenched, idiosyncratic language.

One year, a senior scout was cross-checking a prospect with a generally average evaluation — lots of greens, some purples. But his color suddenly spiked blue on a tab that assessed ball skills. The player, average in most categories and tests, simply caught everything thrown his way. The scout stamped a hand emoji on the blue tab and wrote two words in his one-liner: “Peripheral cyanosis.” Blue hands.

Gladstone believes the colors and badges deliver a clear point of view in a simple way. And the fact that each scout can see a picture and mentally translate it into dozens of words in an instant reflects the staff’s continuity.

As the group rolls through the Friday meetings and toward the new year, JAARS constantly receives new data from area scouts still on the road and from OTT scouts as they continue their cross-checks and gather information from all-star events like the Senior Bowl. By now, they all know to be malleable and to speak up when they have the floor, because someone is always listening — or watching, via JAARS.

At the end of every session, Gladstone opens the virtual room for a period of free discussion they call the “water cooler.”

It comes with a story: Before the second day of the 2018 draft, two personnel executives ducked down the hall to grab a snack and a water refill. Snead followed a couple of minutes later, and as he approached the two men, he overheard them discussing an outside linebacker they really liked with a level of gusto they had not shown in the meetings. Snead turned around, walked back to the draft room without the two others knowing he had been there and later called in his pick for Ogbo Okoronkwo in the fifth round.

From that day forward, Gladstone worked “water cooler” periods into meetings.

Morton hit the road again in late January, this time to Mobile, Ala., for the Senior Bowl. The first day’s work began, once again, at a local Starbucks.

Special assistant to the GM Andy Sugarman stood in line a couple of paces behind Morton with scouting fellow Michael Young behind him. Morton ordered a large black coffee and egg white bites, stashing the latter in his bag. Sugarman got a ham and Swiss croissant while Young ordered a venti iced blonde espresso, with four extra shots — eight total. Light ice. Scouts.

The Rams are among a couple of teams who do not attend the Senior Bowl en masse. After 2020, Snead, McVay and their direct staff stopped going to Mobile in person because they felt they could work more efficiently remotely.

All 32 teams receive the same data and tape from the event, so Temme and the Rams’ video team upload measurements and daily film cut-ups from drills and practices into JAARS. The video cut-ups of drills and game film are organized by player, so Snead and others can watch those in sequence without jumping from player to player all over a field as they would in person. Temme also receives tracking data, a highly valuable resource in assessing how a prospect moves when actually playing football.

Because the film of each practice drill uploads daily, Snead found his staff could get through the entire week almost in real time. When they traveled to the event, they only began watching practice cut-ups after they got home, so the prospect evaluation process after the Senior Bowl used to take the Rams two or three additional weeks.

They still believe having an under-the-radar presence at all-star events is important — Young’s report from last year’s East/West Shrine Bowl helped reiterate to senior staff that nose tackle Kobie Turner, an eventual starter and Defensive Rookie of the Year candidate, was bigger than he looked on tape — and the trio of staffers in Mobile absorb what Morton refers to as “free-flowing information” throughout Senior Bowl week.

Morton watches some drills in person, but he’ll comb through most of the week in film study. He uses his time on the sidelines to get information from the many college position coaches and coordinators in attendance.

“When you have the opportunity to talk to somebody — particularly if they have coached or know one of the players at the (practice), to me that takes precedence over watching practice,” said Morton.

As the first practice of the week began at the University of South Alabama’s Hancock Whitney Stadium, the three men split up. Sugarman spent the first half in the metal bleachers with several dozen other scouts and team personnel before moving up to the press box. Young and Morton rotated between the sidelines and the stadium’s lower bowl.

They seemed to know everybody — Morton stopped to talk with two college head coaches and a handful of assistants at various points of the practice. He got a full report about one draft-eligible prospect from a coach after running into him outside the bathroom. (Later in the pre-draft cycle, fans of that college noted the Rams as the lone absence among NFL teams from that player’s pro day.) Young asked questions of different contacts while keeping one eye on the drills and simultaneously typing notes into his phone.

When the three met back up at Sugarman’s rental car after practice hours later, the tidbits of information flowed. Morton finally finished his coffee from the morning and ate the egg bites that had been sitting in his bag the entire day.

Turns out nothing can rattle a scout’s stomach, either.

After a brief dinner break, the three men reconvened at the Mobile Convention Center, joining a horde of NFL coaches and scouts slowly making their way to a cavernous room on the ground floor sectioned into 32 spaces by tall black curtains — one per team. This is where the nightly prospect interviews took place, a process nicknamed “the car wash,” where four players at a time rotate from space to space — team to team — in 10- to 15-minute intervals over three nights.

For some coaches and senior scouts around the league, it’s the first meeting between team and potential players, but the Rams don’t believe conducting interviews in this setting is valuable. The sessions are late after a full day of practice and classroom work — some players get to their scheduled interviews after 9 p.m. — and prospects are trained for the process by their agents.

“By the time they get to the Senior Bowl and the East/West and all the all-star games, they’ve been coached up somewhat,” Morton said. “And then at the combine, it’s even more so. … The more they are interviewed, the more they know what questions are coming at them.”

The Rams find value in these settings by collecting a large amount of a specific type of information. Over the last couple of years, they have administered to players a customized version of an existing personality, emotional intelligence and leadership assessment called HEXACO. Their version was developed by Sam Walker, a former Wall Street Journal editor who wrote “The Captain Class” — a book on leadership qualities within championship teams — and now consults for the team.

The test consists of 28 questions and takes about six minutes to complete. The answers go directly into JAARS for Walker’s analysis. He hopes to project how each player’s leadership qualities could best be maximized in the Rams’ environment taking into account the team’s existing personality balance. Between the nights of interview sessions at the Senior Bowl and East/West Shrine Bowl, the Rams annually file over 300 customized HEXACO submissions.

Young, Morton and Sugarman each set up a computer along a few tables in their section and directed players to them as they filtered in. Young reassured them that “there are no right or wrong answers.”

Because the players moved through rooms in groups of four, there was often someone waiting on a computer. After setting up the others, Young would open up a conversation with the waiting prospect. His strategy was to immediately mention a detail or connection with each that he had identified beforehand — a coaching contact, something he picked up from film or even a move he saw at practice that day.

“Just finding different ways that I can relate to them,” Young said. “Once they look at you and they know you’re doing your research and your homework, their eyes get a little bit bigger.”

Like every other data point compiled by the Rams’ scouts, the test is eventually weighed with a number of other items, like the area and OTT scouts’ sourcing on character and personality (the “deep dig”), formal background checks, learning assessments and more. “All of it is just a piece of the puzzle,” Morton said.

While Morton and Young floated between players and made conversation as the prospects finished their assessments or waited for their turn, Sugarman quietly observed. His unique role in finding Rams was only beginning.

Coming Friday, Part II …