How Snead drafts (a good read IMO)

For Rams GM Les Snead, crucial draft decisions mean unraveling his brain

Jourdan Rodrigue

https://theathletic.com/2048491/2020/09/15/for-rams-gm-les-snead-crucial-draft-decisions-mean-unraveling-his-brain/?source=twittered

During the many meetings that happen throughout the pre-draft process every spring, Rams general manager Les Snead often doesn’t tell his personnel people which players he likes.

What?!

Consider how this shakes out, from the perspective of a Rams scout: Snead gets you in a room with a few others to talk about a few possible draft targets you have visited, either at pro days or private workouts.

Snead has seen all of the tape you’ve seen and all your notes. He also has his own pile of notes, written in his slanted script that capitalizes some of the Ms and Ns, the compilation of more than a year of study spent on each possible pick — but he’s not showing them to you. He’s just listening, asking questions here and there, absorbing responses and observing reactions. As the weeks and months pass and the draft approaches, more people are added to the process, from front-office officials to analysts and data scientists to the coaching staff.

But Snead doesn’t coerce any of them to lean a certain way toward any specific prospect. In fact, he’s extra careful to strip away any variables that might hint at a bias toward one player over another. Any such clues could influence another person’s opinion or even prompt them to withhold certain information from Snead, because he understands what biases in the brain form within the employee/employer relationship.

“I like to approach it as if I don’t know the answer,” Snead told The Athletic this summer. “But there are a lot of people in the building who might … so how do we actually collaborate? How do we avoid groupthink?”

This methodology is just one facet of Snead’s approach to the decision-making process, the cognitive psychology of which he has studied closely, especially so this offseason.

Snead operates in a role that quietly remains among the most high-pressure and high-stakes in football: talent evaluation and selection. And for the Rams, that is more important than ever.

The “money” guys within the Rams’ football offices are very clearly working to establish the core of the franchise with several long-term, substantial contracts for top players, including Jared Goff, Jalen Ramsey, Aaron Donald, Cooper Kupp and, as The Athletic learned this week, perhaps also Robert Woods. The known financial commitments of the first four players could account for as much as $102 million of the projected $175 million 2021 salary cap. And while the Rams’ financial people will work to pick and choose key larger-sum additions and subtractions to the 2021 roster, Snead must complement them with his draft classes and particularly nail the second through sixth rounds, during which the bulk of the Rams’ picks will exist.

The NFL Draft is all about making the right decision and especially making it at the right time.

So while within the Rams’ scouting and football-personnel offices, the decisions themselves are important, perhaps even more important is how they are made.

Denise Shull is literally an expert in how people make high-profile, high-stakes decisions and in the psychology behind their processes.

Shull, a former Wall Street trader who founded high-stakes decision-making consulting firm The ReThink Group in 2003, first worked solely with hedge funds and other power players in the financial world. But then, she began to hear that some of her clients were using her tools in their own golf games, in auto racing and even in Little League Baseball coaching. Shull found that the act of high-stakes decision-making in the finance world and in the sports world doesn’t differ much when stripped down through her analysis process because, after all, each is run by human beings with human brains.

“There is this new understanding of how the human brain really works,” Shull told The Athletic this spring. “What we’re really learning is that we’re always predicting. The mechanism of thought is predicting. … The basic mechanism of human perception in judgement and decision-making is predicting a feeling. Well, none of us are taught to analyze that in any sort of organized way. In hedge funds, it’s called ‘conviction.’ In sports, it’s called ‘passion,’ ‘confidence,’ ‘resilience.’

“The popular way of performance coaching in either realm is, ‘Use your thinking to overcome your impulses and urges.’”

Snead is fascinated by this topic. He owns stacks of books about decision-making, in which he scribbles within the margins ideas about how each point could apply in the Rams’ offices. He and his wife, Kara, trade books and ideas like sisters trade clothes, and they are even starting a podcast soon that will focus on how humans make decisions. Snead exists in a world of superstar athletes and coaches, but the bigger influence on him is a professional poker player and high-stakes decision strategist named Annie Duke, who has written two books specifically on the subject (Snead owns them both, courtesy of Kara).

“What we do is really study this so that we can try to make deliberate decisions,” Snead said. “(And) the time to make deliberate decisions is really when you are rational, really scrutinizing your process and how you’re engineering all of the ways you collect data from people, and from past decisions, and then try to engineer the process so that when you do get to the heat of the moment, you just surrender the results to the process.”

Shull’s goal, when she works with clients, is to help them understand the true spectrum of those “convictions,” impulses and urges and, instead of acting directly upon an immediate feeling, to discover the power of only acting on the ones that will best serve the task at hand.

Understanding and even reversing some of these “convictions” — these emotions, biases and anchors — can have a profound impact on the success rate of a particular decision-maker, according to Shull.

“In sports, it’s ‘How do I feel today?’ versus ‘How do I want to feel in the future?’” she said. “OK, well everyone wants to win in the future. Be more competitive, win. That’s a desire, that’s emotion. You can use that, if you’re conscious of it, to help you do today the thing you need to do that will get you what you want tomorrow. … You’re making the way the brain really works, work for you.”

Shull has not directly worked with Snead and the Rams. But in her work with, and study of, NFL coaches, teams and individual decision-makers within those teams, Shull has identified commonalities in the biases that so often sway a decision and sink a long-term successful draft rate.

“The easiest ones to wrap your head around are a fear of ‘missing out’ or ‘fear of regret,’” she said.

In NFL speak, that means lunging at a flashy prospect because he’s more appealing than the guy who has been on your list for months, or switching gears last-second because a new coaching staff has come in, or a subconscious fear of failing a team owner who is more involved in the process than normal. All of these things are undercurrents to biases that develop within the evaluation and selection processes.

“Like, ‘Wait, we weren’t expecting this other guy at this other position to be available, and we were kind of interested in him. Gee, maybe we should just grab him instead of sticking with the plan.’ That’s fear of future regret,’” Shull said. And the solution, she added, is maintaining the conviction held prior to the sudden change in opportunity, especially considering the vast body of research and data accumulated on an initial target.

One key to successful high-stakes decision-making is first to introduce functional conflict into the room, in its many forms, and then use it as a tool.

Shull says it’s important to understand that there is always going to be conflict, but the best way to manage it over time is to accept it and make it OK to have two opposing viewpoints — to work to make sure that everyone feels their perspective is heard and respected — so that what she calls the “tendency” toward conflict doesn’t take on a dysfunctional dynamic and ultimately destroy the evaluation and decision-making process.

“These are multiple people with strong egos, with different viewpoints, and you want that,” Shull said. “There have to be conflicts. … So how do those get worked out? Who gets the final say, and for what reason — particularly under pressure?”

And that explains Snead’s methodology in those scouting meetings. He attempts to remove what Shull called the “fear of regret” from the subconscious of his staff. In this case, it’s the fear of introducing an idea or prospect that Snead himself will dislike or disagree with.

Snead also works to create the “functional conflict” that Shull mentioned. This offseason, he also delved into how meetings can be effectively set up to challenge pre-ordained beliefs and emotional biases within the participants on an individual level.

“How do we engineer where dissent is important?” he said. “Let’s say there are (three people): area scout, position coach, coordinator. They really like a player, right? Well, can we now have a setting where you ask the people who you know emotionally are on the table for the player — but let’s now discuss, from their point of view, why that player may not work out? What would be the reasons not to draft him?”

Anchors to players could be as simple as perception attachment — a position coach saw a certain draft grade tied to a player via a website for months — or even become as complex as the conviction of a coach who previously coached that player at a former stop. There could be “first impression” biases that have been applied with the improper weight within someone’s mind from meetings at the Senior Bowl or NFL Scouting Combine. There could be what Snead calls a “late data addition,” ranging from medical red flags to off-the-field issues to even a great pro day from of a lower-ranked prospect that can change a decision-maker’s “anchor” to a player.

That’s when disagreement, with each other and within the self, comes into play.

“(The key is to) allow dissent — and dissent in a way that is civil — so that you can better keep the emotions out of it,” Snead said. “Let’s say the head coach, coordinator and the director of college scouting are really all-in on this player, but maybe your area scout is not all-in. But he’s in his second year. How do you allow that person to have a platform so that maybe he or she can go against the grain?”

In Shull’s mind, an operating procedure such as this, where “functional conflict” is encouraged and people are heard regardless of perceived status, leads to better decision-making.

“You want … to treat conflict in a way that’s effective,” she said, “and then create a culture that is ultimately going to drive more fully informed decisions. And also, when people feel like their point of view was heard and respected, even if it doesn’t get chosen, they have less resentment. They were taken seriously … and any one individual, no matter where they are in the food chain, feeling heard and understood — like, that’s a cultural superpower.”

Perhaps no other spring in NFL history tested the way these ideas are applied in real-life, high-stakes situations than this past one, which was turned upside-down by COVID-19 and the resulting limitations placed on staff and players.

As practiced as all of their processes were, no team was immune to the massive unknowns. Constants became variables; variables became more unpredictable than ever.

The Rams pulled their scouts off the road about halfway through the dozens of pro days that happen annually across the country. Team staffers got busy setting up home offices, teaching people where the mute buttons were and adding ethernet and emergency lines. All business matters began to be conducted virtually and the Rams actually had employees work from home even through spring workouts.

Here, though, some across the league felt they had the advantage. Some coaches and general managers thought that conversations oddly felt more personal because of the way in which faces are separated in Zoom and because colleagues were now speaking with colleagues with their home decor in the background. Without players on campus or planes to catch, there actually was more time to go through tape.

In that environment, Shull hypothesized, a team actively working to turn what would seem like a disadvantage into an edge might actually find success in the removal of things like staff meetings with prospects, group interviews or visits to pro days.

“Sometimes nervousness in that situation can be misunderstood and misapplied,” she said. “You just develop an impression, and that impression may not be fully accurate. … These guys are going to be nervous. … Feelings transfer from one person to another unconsciously. So you can pick up on someone’s nervousness, or anger, without them even knowing it. And it will color your impression of that person. But it’s not accurate.

“So I do think it’s possible that better decisions have been made this year through this different format.”

The decision made on each Rams draft pick in 2020 was the product of 14 months of research, breaking down that research, disseminating information, creating draft boards and alternate options for every scenario and then creating the same bias-removal and cognitive psychology-motivated spaces for meetings — all virtually.

The process is grueling. But when it works the way Snead wants it to, it is not just a sound decision-making tool, but it is also a helpful predictive model that basically sets up the Rams’ decisions in advance. All they have to do is press the button.

“Draft day is the easiest part because it comes to you,” Snead said. “And the preparation leads to making that decision.”

After the draft and spring workouts, Rams personnel staff spent much of the summer troubleshooting their own process. In September, every drafted rookie but one — plus three undrafted free agents — made the team’s initial 53-man roster.

One of Snead’s favorite phrases, when explaining decision-making and particularly as it pertains to drafting, is maintaining an ability to see through both “a microscope and a telescope.”

Shull says from a psychological perspective, maintaining that balance — of the short term as it weighs against the long term — is crucial to making sound decisions under pressure.

For example, sixth-round draft pick Jordan Fuller started for the Rams at safety on Sunday night against the Dallas Cowboys. Fuller climbed up the ladder in training camp quickly because of the opportunity that came from teammate Taylor Rapp’s injury and Fuller’s savvy at the position. Against Dallas in the fourth quarter, he made perhaps the most pivotal play of the game when he halted receiver CeeDee Lamb on fourth-and-3, with the Rams leading by three points.

Fuller immediately looked like a draft steal considering his pick point, and especially in the context of large contracts within the Rams’ defense that require him to play well and early in his career.

But Snead probably will wait to tell anybody how he feels about that until he has seen some long-term data on the matter. If he “anchors” himself to a player or a false sense of security too early in the post-draft and development process, he’ll run counter to his own planned psychological balance. The Rams have already begun work on the 2021 draft class. The process has started again, but it carries the variables of prior years with it.

After all …

“We are building a team,” Snead said, “not collecting talent.”