How Rams’ UDFA & draft processes work

zn wrote:

Jourdan Rodrigue@JourdanRodrigue

In 2021 I wrote about how they were starting to scout differently.

here’s that article. It’s posted in another thread too but it can be in 2 threads, n.p.

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Inside the Rams’ major changes to their draft process, and why they won’t go back to ‘normal’

Jourdan Rodrigue

Apr 12, 2021

https://theathletic.com/2507342/2021/04/12/inside-the-rams-major-changes-to-their-draft-process-and-why-they-wont-go-back-to-normal/

In January, as on-field drills got underway at the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala., under the gaze of dozens of NFL talent evaluators, Rams general manager Les Snead and his staff were watching the broadcast of the event from their homes, instead.

Taking necessary safety precautions against COVID-19 forced teams to move toward an all-virtual offseason last spring, and the Rams pulled their scouts off the road during college football season in the fall. But even as in-person scouting events increased little by little this spring, the Rams largely kept operations virtual. It wasn’t just the Senior Bowl; the Rams have only sparsely attended this spring’s local or regional college pro days that replaced the annual NFL scouting combine.

Even in the post-pandemic offseasons of the future, the Rams won’t likely be prominent figures at any of these pre-draft events. Individual meetings held with prospects have been conducted virtually leaguewide over the last two seasons, but even when restrictions are ultimately lifted, the Rams aren’t likely to return to the old ways of in-person “top 30” visits or private workouts with players at the team facilities.

This change in the Rams’ approach directly correlates to the ways they’ve also changed their pre-draft evaluation process — from the data points they match to players, to how they project development, to their internal hierarchy of physical testing and even to their use of resources such as the time and energy spent evaluating players. Last spring, the pandemic — and resulting restrictions — only expedited the changes beginning to take hold within the Rams’ building. In some ways, the Rams even felt they were proved right about the direction they are heading as they watched five of their draft picks become substantial role players in 2020 (running back Cam Akers and safety Jordan Fuller became starters).

In fact, it doesn’t sound like they’re ever going back to the way it was done before.

“We’re always trying to build to where you don’t necessarily have to be there (in person),” Snead told The Athletic. “That’s a model we’re trying to come up with.”

To understand why the Rams are comfortable operating like this, it’s important to first know how their valuation of some of the data produced at events such as the combine or pro days has changed over the years.

All of the data is important, and it’s being shared at a greater rate than ever before. This year NFL teams are sharing medical information on players and testing numbers, and each team constantly collects and assembles everything from athletic profiles, to film, to interviews with scouts and college coaches, to psychological profiles and more (how deeply they dive into each category varies by team).

“With no combine, all pro days we will share data, but that occurs every year in a system that’s referred to as the APT system,” Snead said. “Every club doesn’t have to attend a pro day, but (if a player at a) subset school didn’t go to the combine, we can (still) get the standard 40-yard dash, standard short shuttles, and that data is shared.”

The difference for the Rams is in how they disseminate and apply that data to the players themselves.

Take the 40-yard dash as an example.

Earlier this spring, NFL Network draft analyst Daniel Jeremiah tweeted that he believes the 40-yard dash — perennially marketed to fans as the premier event of the NFL combine and prospect pro days — will soon become obsolete.

In the Rams’ building, it already is — and has been for a couple of years.

“Does it matter whether (a receiver) runs a 4.48 or a 4.56? No,” said J.W. Jordan, the Rams’ director of draft management. “That’s where you use tape, GPS, all the information and data you have on him. Does (the 40) really and truly matter? No.”

Ever since colleges began providing teams with GPS data for players, the Rams have been among the NFL teams to use and apply the data to what they see on film. By doing this, they are not watching how fast a player runs in a straight line — they are projecting how fast he gets into position on a field, in a variety of live-action scenarios. They can see how his play speed matches up against his opponents and how well he can move at the opening of a play, versus when it breaks down and he has to freestyle.

“If you’re looking for a Cooper Kupp, a guy who can do the stuff over the middle, can be a great route runner and get separation with quickness,” Jordan said, “if that’s what you need in a given year, you wouldn’t weight that 40 time as heavily and you might have guys like that (on your board) ahead of guys with faster times.”

Kupp, whom the Rams drafted in the third round in 2017, ran a 4.62-second 40 at the NFL combine. But the team wasn’t really interested in that time; instead, they pulled the GPS data from the routes he ran at the Senior Bowl to gauge how quickly he could navigate the shorter space he would be working with as a slot receiver in their system.

Similarly, the Rams felt Fuller dropped into the sixth round in the 2020 draft because he ran a 4.6-second 40-yard dash — and could not believe their luck when they saw him falling to their pick in that round. Internal scouts, plus former director of college scouting Brad Holmes, had been extremely high on Fuller’s game tape, and the Rams had GPS data from Ohio State that showed Fuller’s remarkable ability to cover a field — at a much higher play speed than his straight-line test indicated.

“The answer to most of our questions is found by watching film of that football player play football,” Snead said. “Not necessarily watching that player do a short shuttle … or an interview where he’s probably prepped on how to answer the questions based on how you want them answered.

“Ninety percent of your evaluation is going to come from watching the orchestra play music or watching the actress act, not watching them memorize their lines.”

That’s not to say the Rams don’t take a player’s straight-line speed (best demonstrated by a 40-yard dash) into account in their overall evaluation of that player. For a “speed threat” receiver, Jordan said, the Rams might weight that time just a bit more than they would a technical receiver such as Kupp. Jordan said that a 40 time can also be helpful as a flag or checks-balances tool in the rare occasions in which a player initially ranked very low on an evaluation blows out his measurables/testing. At that point, the 40 time’s usefulness expands to that of a signal to scouts to check their early evaluation, and see if there is anything they missed or any additional outliers.

For the Rams, it’s just a less important data point than many, many other traits and measurables, and certainly less important than what they see from that player in a game. Snead said the last 10 percent of the evaluation could come from any number of things — but it should serve as a confirmation of what an evaluator found in the other 90 percent, not as a catalyst to change it.

If a measurable such as a 40-yard dash is this much less of a deciding factor in the Rams’ draft process, and if those data points are at once available to the team without them needing to spend the unnecessary extra time to obtain them, why would they?

“It’s not like my ability to time a 40 is better or worse than anybody else’s,” Jordan laughed. “I don’t need to sit there and time a guy on the 40 to believe that he ran whatever time it was. … We get the data, we get the information. As long as we get it, that’s all that matters. … I don’t need to watch a guy jump a vertical jump.”

As he spoke, Jordan turned the volume down on the television in his office, on which a pro day was being broadcast by the NFL Network. He called it “good background noise.”

As the Rams’ view on measurables such as the 40-yard dash has shifted, and data-sharing has increased among NFL teams, so has their usage of time-on-task hours.

The position drills at the Senior Bowl are perennially a helpful tool for teams because they pit a pool of higher-level draft talent against their peers, instead of relying on a range of opponents varying in skill level through the college season. Yet Snead feels he and his staff of evaluators may be even better served viewing them virtually — so even as NFL evaluators were allowed to attend the all-star event, the Rams stayed home.

Snead explained that if he were to be in the bleachers in Mobile, Ala., watching those workouts in person, he wouldn’t be able to extrapolate the players he actually wanted to see, nor focus full attention on any one player for an extended period of time for fear of missing another.

In a virtual setting, the Rams’ regional scouts watched the broadcast of the practices live, then received film of each player in their region courtesy of the Senior Bowl’s staff. When the scouts finished writing their reports, the film then was cross-referenced by position evaluators and analysts, who also wrote reports on all of the prospects in their respective “pools” of talent. Each of the Rams’ personnel staff members did this from their own home.

The whole process took about a week, whereas Snead said if the Rams had traveled to the Senior Bowl, it would take them two or three weeks to get through the same workload. Film study wouldn’t even start until after every staff member returned from Mobile.

“It’s about trying to be efficient with the time, versus, ‘Let’s all travel and let’s all hang out in Mobile,’” he said. “You get a feel for kind of ‘live’ work … then you go back and do all of this next week, where you watch the film. The Senior Bowl really calls for two weeks of work, maybe more (with travel) …

“Let’s look at the amount of travel we’ve been doing. Is that really necessary, or are we only doing it because that’s the way it’s always been? Can we actually engineer a setting where our evaluators can have the time to evaluate more film, travel less?”

James Gladstone, the Rams’ director of scouting strategy, has nicknamed such a process “overriding old data.”

“What are you doing, and why are you doing it?” Snead explained the phrase. “The easiest thing to do is to say, ‘hey, this is what we’re doing.’ But I think what I’ve challenged our group to do is to know why we’re doing it — and does that ‘why’ give us an advantage?

“And if it doesn’t, we should eliminate it.”

The Rams tried this approach with the NFL scouting combine in 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic escalated into a global crisis.

Snead and head coach Sean McVay attended the combine (usually seven to 10 days long) for only about 24 hours, to conduct their annual pre-draft media sessions. Most of the Rams’ assistant coaches and coordinators didn’t travel to Indianapolis. Instead, they gathered the most important part of it — players’ medical data — via their team physicians who were on site.

“There are a lot better things for me to do that would be more beneficial to the Rams than spend seven to eight days at the combine,” Snead said. “Even when I was there, I’d spend a lot of time in the hotel room doing film evaluation and what-have-you, just because it’s hard to lose those weeks.

“Even analyzing data, it’s better for me to sit with our ‘Nerd’s Nest’ (the Rams’ team of analysts stationed in Thousand Oaks, Calif.) and analyze the data coming in, of all of these kids running 40s and short shuttles and all of that, than me watching them do it.”

Jordan said that many of the events of the combine are more ritualistic than they are of actual value to teams.

“The most important thing at the combine is the medical information that you get from the physicals,” he said. “That doesn’t affect scouts. … I believe that if you put most people on a lie detector test, you’d find out that a lot of people think that, from a scouting perspective, a lot of stuff you do at the combine is done just because everybody does it, and everybody’s always done it, and it’s just checking a box.”

That includes the notorious combine interview process — sometimes referred to as the “car wash” — in which prospects churn through a series of 15- to 20-minute interviews with teams. A group of NFL personnel people, sometimes including the head coach and even team psychologists, sit in a room with a prospect and essentially grill him. They might ask the prospect to draw up plays or run him through a series of mental hoops and odd questions. Snead and Jordan believe this process, which unfairly backs a prospect into a corner against a dozen NFL people, also increases the likelihood that a player is coached by agents on what to say, or is automatically at a disadvantage by being one person speaking, or “presenting” to a group of NFL personnel. That dynamic can present a skewed version of a player’s actual personality, and influence a whole new set of unconscious biases within some evaluators.

“Why do you have to be sitting in the same room with them?” Jordan said. “Maybe you get a little bit out of it, but are you really going to figure out a person in 15-20 minutes?”

Without a formal combine, teams can spend multiple hour-long sessions with prospects via video conferencing. Even when in-person interviews return, Jordan says the Rams won’t overlook the value of more private, personalized and in-depth conversations that happen virtually.

“If you’re looking to really dive into the kid, the person, the background, the football knowledge — in a lot of ways, it’s actually better,” he said. “The more intimate setting (makes players more comfortable). It’s not one kid walking into a job interview with 10 people staring at him. It seems like the one-on-one intimate setting, kids are more comfortable. When they’re more comfortable, they tend to be more honest.”

The Rams’ changing of their philosophy and practices during draft season has been in the works for a few years — and drastic adjustments into an all-virtual setting forced by the pandemic in the 2020 draft expedited the process.

“Off the heels of that 2020 draft, and really looking toward 2021, we refined our process to guide an approach that centered around one main thing,” Gladstone said. “That being: Measuring raw potential in really an authentic football environment, to determine the scheme fit and the culture fit (of the player).

“And the benefits of no in-person all-star attendance, no combine and minimal pro day attendance where we’re just sending folks on specific ‘missions’ is that the transfer of energy that would otherwise be given to logistics or travel is turned into film evaluation — an authentic football environment of a player performing — and digging deep with sources on the human being, (and) then the virtual player interviews where you now have the capacity to potentially reach more.”

Their model began to shift in 2016, as the then-St. Louis Rams began their transition to Los Angeles, and they faced another dramatic catalyst to their everyday processes. Similarly to 2020, they were largely working from home during the peak of draft season (without the same technology they have today).

“We realized that some of the things that we were doing in terms of meeting and traveling were inefficient,” Jordan said. “We were not equipped, from a technological standpoint, to do some of the things that we are now. But we were dealing with the same type of issues in the sense that we cleared out (our offices) in St. Louis sometime in February, and didn’t get out to Los Angeles until April as a scouting department.

“That was the year we traded up for (Jared Goff), we drafted (Tyler) Higbee. We got Cory Littleton and Morgan Fox as undrafted free agents … and that may have been the true genesis of it, in a sense, where it put the realization in our heads that, ‘Hey, we got through these two months basically working remotely.’ And I think that might have been the first realization that we didn’t really miss much by being in limbo during the move. From there, we had an infusion of younger, more tech-savvy people who could really push it to the next level.

“We didn’t bring either Cory or Morgan in on a visit, didn’t do an interview with Cory at the combine. … It sticks with you, those sorts of things. Like, ‘Do we really need to do this?’”

Now, the Rams may never go back to the “old” ways, even as restrictions and precautions start to lift.

Without a combine, many teams have flooded the local and regional pro days held in its place with their maximum allotment of personnel (three per team, per league rules). For several teams, it’s the first opportunity to see prospects in person.

The Arizona Cardinals, for example, have sent multiple personnel people and coaches to at least 50 pro days this spring. Titans head coach Mike Vrabel told reporters last week that his own staff had been working hard through the spring to get someone at every single pro day.

Yet the Rams have sparsely attended these events, and they certainly have not sent three of their personnel people at once. Even at more widely populated pro days held by some powerhouse FBS schools they were the only one of 32 not to go. Rams personnel people admit that there’s a safety element to staying away from more populated events — plus, with limited draft resources this year, they don’t want to tip their hand too much toward any one prospect or school.

“Why take the extra risk if there’s no additional reward to taking that risk?” Jordan said. “Everything they do is on film. We can watch all of it … the risk/reward thing doesn’t add up to send people.”

For many inside the Rams’ personnel department, it’s tough to see a return to an offseason schedule that would feature their presence at multiple pre-draft events. Gladstone believes that the time they save — as well as the financial resources required to coordinate that travel period — can be funneled into an even more robust analytics department and the investment into analytical resources used by the team to help disseminate a massive wave of data that will hit the NFL in the coming years.

Meanwhile, the Rams’ team-building model has also shifted. In recent years, Snead has offloaded their first-round picks in bundles for “proven” entities such as cornerback Jalen Ramsey, and more recently, quarterback Matthew Stafford. Because the Rams are currently winning at a sustainable rate, Snead believes those future first-round picks would be in the latter part of the round and, therefore, worth less in the Rams’ minds than, say, a former No. 5 overall cornerback or No. 1 overall quarterback (two high-value positions; the Rams wouldn’t do this for a running back, for example).

Those players, plus their and other “core contracts,” are an investment into stars but also shrink the Rams’ draft capital and their financial capital. The complementary aspect of that model, then, is to identify and draft players who can develop into starters or role players while still on rookie deals when plugged in between the core contracts, and then let them get paid by somebody else, resulting in the “free” compensatory picks doled out by the NFL each spring.

It’s a fragile ecosystem, so it becomes all the more crucial to find some sort of “edge” within the draft process that makes the Rams more competitive there, given the draft’s importance to their success and relative dearth of capital. Could their re-assessment of resources such as “time,” as well as their data points within the evaluation process, be the answer?

“The results aren’t (going to be) totally clear until a few years later,” Jordan said. “But just looking at our (2020) draft and college free agency … it seems like it was successful given who has contributed in their rookie year.

“Signs are pointing in the right direction.”