Inside The Lines: Behind The Draft

If you are like me, then you probably spent a good amount of your weekend glued to ESPN, NFL Network, or checking your Blackberry frantically to see who was getting drafted and to what team they went.

While our friends from both networks examined, analyzed and sometimes tore up selections and gave us stats on every player selected, they don't give us an inside look to what goes on behind the scenes.

I hope this entry will leave you with a better idea of what goes on behind the scenes and how a few thousand man hours is used when you have 30 minutes to use on a clock.

When we hear about the draft, we will often hear of the "War Room. Every team has a Warm Room, and even college teams have War Rooms. In the NFL, we only hear about the War Room in regards to the draft, however, the War Room is also used by coaches during halftime of a game. This is where all the adjustments are made, agreed upon (or not) and then presented to the team before going out for the second half.. The most famous War Room is however the room that ever NFL team has at their Headquarters. If you watched ESPN, you may have seen inside the Dallas War Room, and if you did, you have a good, if not better Idea of who run's the show in Big D.



At the Raiders, we actually had two War Rooms, one was one for the personnel side, featuring all the necessary statistics on the players — height, weight, speed, shuttle times, broad jump, vertical jump, hand size, arm length, Wonderlic score, agent, etc. We also had a Financial War Room that our Salary Cap guys designed featuring the necessary statistics on all NFL players in the league from a Cap and cash reference — salary, Cap number, likely and unlikely incentives, acceleration number, last contract year, prorated bonus, age, agent — as well as charts on every team consisting of cash and Cap spending by position group, by offense/defense, by year, by draft or free agency and pending free agents. In my opinion, the most important person in the front office next to the GM, is the Cap Guy. The work and number crunching that goes on is as impressive as the talent on the field. These guys can make or break you depending on how good they are. It's not just about playing the numbers on the roster through deletion, but projecting the what "if's" and what "could's" this year, and then forecasting out. When you think about injury's, trades, and suspensions, the work they do is nothing short of genius. A rumor I was told by a current GM is that New England was actually sent a formula several years ago that was designed by a returned NASA scientist. Pioli, Craft and Belichick were so impressed, they bought the rights to is and had it patented. I was told it was the equivalent of Sabermetrics on steroids.

As for the draft "War Room", it is used throughout the year for ranking top players on the “ready” list in case a need came up at a certain position. It also had depth charts of every team, including practice squad players. However, the War Room’s most celebrated two days of the year are always NFL Draft weekend in late April. That’s when the room becomes the venue for decisions that affect franchises’ fortunes for years to come. Our "draft boards" took up 3 walls. One one wall we had every college prospect who was eligible to come out the following year. The second wall was a list of current free agents who were not signed or playing for anyone currently. The third wall, was made up of players entering free agency or who were offered by other teams in trades.

I'm told that the setup in the room we had in Oakland is quite similar throughout the league. Typically, the lead decision-maker – the general manager or head coach/general manager, sits at either the head of the table or in front of the draft board listing all the players (the board), flanked by the personnel assistant on one side and usually the head coach, if he’s not the primary decision-maker, on the other. Surrounding that brain trust is other personnel staff assigned to work the phones with other teams for trades, with designated people assigned to work with certain teams based on established relationships. Nearby are the doctors and trainers with copious records of each player and their physicals, coded with a number system that usually goes from 1 to 4, one being completely clean to four being a complete fail. One of my jobs was to put together excerprets from any online or news media regarding players we were interested in. This info could be in regards to off the field incidents, quotes after games, quotes from coaches, etc. We keep this information on our opponents as well. We have binders on each team from our league (AFC) and divide those up by conference. We use websites like RotoWorld and KFFL.com. We would hardly ever use major outlets for this info. KFFL and Rotoworld tend to break news from an information standpoint, mush like the simple aspects of the transaction reports in the back of our newspaper, while ESPN, and FOX will offer more opinion inflicted information.



As to additional personnel populating the room, flanked somewhere near the personnel people are the Cap/contract person, ready at the call to advise on Cap implications of moving up or down and working the agents to glean information — and a research/statistics person who has evaluated trade possibilities and other analytic models for potential scenarios. Televisions are on and tuned to ESPN, the NFL Network (the league preference) or both. And, of course, there’s a person on the line with a team official sitting in New York at the event, always at the ready to fill out and hand in the “card” with the player’s name. Different teams have different feelings about who’s allowed to enter and remain in the War Room. I’ve heard that there are teams that don’t allow anyone other than the top decision-makers to enter the room, restricting access even to people who have spent months preparing the team for this day. Most rooms are much more open and allow staff to share in the important events of the day.

One of the mistakes made in War Rooms, in my opinion, is that decision-makers get emotional and impulsive. Scouts and general managers have scoured the country since July, spending hundreds of hours and millions of dollars putting together all the information that now sits in front of them on the board. Even knowing this, I have seen and continuously heard about decision-makers who — at the moment of truth – will stray from the board. Why? They get emotional about a player who may be rated below the player that the board dictates they should select. There’s a saying in War Rooms: “Trust the Board,” yet there are still teams that, in the heat of the moment, do not. All of the work of scouts and personnel staff that went into putting it together can be ignored in a moment of impulse. Nothing will deflate the morale of a scouting staff faster than that.

Although some boards are structured differently than others, most teams place the players they feel are first-round worthy on a line above the first round, second-round projected players above the second-round line and so on. It’s rare when a team would have 32 players rated as first round, although there may be that number or more in the later rounds. A team feels very good about its draft, no matter what the pundits or its competitors say, when it has trusted its board and selected, say, a player rated by them as a second-rounder in the third, a player rated as a fourth-rounder in the sixth, etc.

The first-round pick usually flies into his new team’s facility after being selected to meet the media right away. Since many teams have draft parties throughout the day and into the evening, some are lucky enough to get the player in front of their gathered audience before the party ends. Sometimes that isn’t the greatest idea because players are occasionally booed when their name is called out as the team’s top draft pick. Another example of how the Draft is fan friendly is the introduction of "Draft Parties" hosted by NFL teams at their Headquarters. The past two years the San Francisco 49ers have held a draft party at their headquarters in Santa Clara. The invites are usually hard to come by. Most of the people who attend are luxury suite owners, team sponsors, local media, and a few lucky season ticket holders.



Working the draft, as I said above, is about pacing yourself, especially for the decision-maker. There are hands to shake, media to speak with, interminable bouts of waiting for other teams to pick and trying to manage a room that varies in size and interest throughout the atmosphere of the weekend

Most of the trading during the draft involves picks rather than players. Occasionally, players are traded, but the vast majority of exchanges are made so that teams that covet certain players can move up. This is where draft value charts come into play. There is a basic version, first developed by Jimmy Johnson in the early 1990s and tweaked and re-cast by several different teams. When trades are proposed, they are couched in terms of the overall number of the pick, such as No. 52 and No. 127, rather than offering a second and a fourth. Trades are proposed throughout the days, with the calculator drumming out which team comes out ahead in the proposed trades. Teams will move up, move back and, as the draft moves into its later stages, trade out of this year’s draft entirely, giving up low-round picks for picks in next year’s draft. The basic value of future picks a year away appears to be a round earlier – thus trading away a 2010 sixth rounder now is like trading away a 2009 seventh rounder. There are scenarios in which that valuation is flawed, in my opinion, especially in higher rounds, but it seems to be the one that’s used. Trades often happen fast and furious, as team personnel is ready at the call with sheets detailing the terms set to run them by Joel Bussert and his staff at the league office. Once approved, the trading team takes over the slotted selection.

After the draft, things start to heat up. It’s now time for teams to sign the hundreds of players – some teams will sign close to 20 — they have scouted who were not drafted over the seven rounds. Team personnel begin calling players and agents as early as the week before the draft, putting their names in to let them know they have a strong interest if the player isn’t drafted. At that point, every agent says the same thing: “If you’re interested, draft him!” The standard response from team personnel is that their picks are targeting other positions, but they have the player as a priority undrafted free agent. Some of these players do get selected, primarily in the seventh round – which has more picks than any other round due to compensatory picks – but most do not, setting off the feeding frenzy immediately following the draft.



When the undrafted free agent frenzy ends, the draft is over. The phones keep ringing with agents begging and asking to bring in players not signed, but at this point, a team’s staff can finally breathe. The war of attrition has ended, and team officials are still standing. The draft class will be analyzed from every angle over the next 24 hours, with the opinion of their peers mattering the most. Draft weekend is over — time to get some food and a drink and start preparing for the incoming class’ arrival for mini-camp in a few days. Even though the draft is over, the work never ends. Players will be invited to minicamps as well as other workouts. We will monitor the waiver and cut boards across the league. All our files will be updated, so when we do see something come across the waiver wire, we can immediately look the person up and have a small library of info on him. This will happen throughout the spring and summer months, all the way up till the last pre-season game.