Cards still adjusting Top 120 draft list

GM Keim, staff continue evaluating college talent

When it comes to discussing the NFL draft, Cardinals General Manager Steve Keim is fond of using and reusing some of his favorite pet phrases.

“The draft is an inexact science.” “Your needs in April and May are always different than they are in October.”

“We fall in love will a player in the fall and we confuse ourselves with him in the spring.”

Some things never change, although Keim did acknowledge he has slightly adjusted the way he and the franchise assemble and prioritize their Top 120 draft board. The Cardinals’ full draft board runs deeper than 120 players as 262 picks overall will be made in this year’s draft, which is set to begin Thursday with the first round.

Arizona’s Top 120, however, is the gospel it uses in determining the best and brightest prospects, the ones most likely to earn a second contract in the NFL and last a while. Therefore, the finished product must be as close to the truth as possible. Players must be triple checked upon triple checked and the process of making final rankings must be precise and devoid of emotion or bias.

Usually, Keim’s full Top 120 board is set by now, a week ahead of the draft. This year, the Cardinals are taking a bit more time to make their final evaluations.

“I think every year you just try to find some things that you can always improve upon,” Keim said Thursday during his pre-draft news conference with coach Kliff Kingsbury at the team’s Tempe training facility. “I think more than anything, the one thing that I’ve thought about is over the years is instead of trying to cram it all into one or two days is to try to be able to take a step back.”

As of Thursday, Keim said the top 50 rankings were finished. Another 40 or so prospects will be added shortly and by the end of the weekend, the final 30 will round things out. This way, Keim said, the team can “continue to sort of massage the board and make sure that you have the guys stacked appropriately.”

In addition to Keim and the entire scouting department, others in the room when the Cardinals build and decipher their Top 120 board include Kingsbury, defensive coordinator Vance Joseph and Jeff Rodgers, assistant head coach and special teams coordinator. They’ll talk through the entire process together, with each and every person offering their opinions and final analysis.

“To me, the thing that’s important is to take the emotions out of draft day,” Keim said. “You’ve already had those conversations, there’s not any sort of emotions on draft day that you get excited and all of a sudden some type of excitement that says, “Why is this guy still here?” We’ve already had those conversations and we’ve talked it through, and we’ve had some dialogue.

“Some of the conversations are tough and guys are passionate, which you love. Certainly, don’t want everybody to agree on players. It’s healthy to have some variance in grades and opinions. That’s what we’re going through right now.”

Mark Dominik ascended through the front office ranks to GM in much the same way Keim slowly rose to power with the Cardinals. Dominik spent nearly 20 years with the Buccaneers, first as a pro personnel assistant and a scout before serving as director of scouting and ultimately general manager from ’09-13.

He and the Buccaneers had their own system for building and ranking what they hoped would be their perfect draft board. Part of it involved asking the coaches to help rank their favorite prospects at the positions they coached.

“I’d say, ‘Now tell me why?’ ” Dominik, now a draft analyst for SiriusXM NFL Radio and ESPNU Radio, said during a conference call with NFL reporters earlier this week. “They’d say, ‘Well, I need instincts, but I really want athleticism. I need speed, but I want some strength.’ I’d say, ‘OK, but you’re WILL linebacker, what’s the most important thing? They’d say, ‘OK, it’s speed.’

“OK, what about size? ‘Well, size is like an 8.’ What about feet because you’ve got to have coverage? So, it’s a really good way as the draft starts to fall down in the rounds you start to lose some of those critical traits, but you still see what’s the most important at that position and it helps you identify some of the guys in the mid-rounds to be able to grab them.”

When it came to finalizing their draft board, Dominik said the Buccaneers would take the top-rated player at each position on both offense and defense, weigh them against each of the other No.1 prospects, and start placing them 1 through 120 or however long their specific draft board was any given year.

In some cases, there might be two offensive tackles identified as the top two players available in the draft. In other scenarios, the top five prospects might be defensive players. So long as the grading is fair, accurate and unbiased, it should all play out the right way.

“If you honestly do that and work through that and you’ve blended over offense and defense, you’ve kind of set your board to that 120,” Dominik said. “It’s going to be adjusted to what you take because you’re not going to take seven centers, but that’s the way you’re going to get your board set up to that 120 number, which inevitably you don’t actually hit, which shows you how crazy every board is so different in the NFL.”

Keim will oversee his 10th NFL draft as GM of the Cardinals, and he said he’s learned from his past mistakes as much as he’s learned from his past successes. One of those lessons came just a year ago when in March, he traded a thirdround pick to the Raiders in exchange for Pro Bowl center Rodney Hudson and a seventh-rounder.

“At one point in time you use to think about offensive centers as a secondary position and the difference that Rodney Hudson made on our football team, particularly with the quarterback, the communication and his smarts and intelligence in that position, it was exceptional,” Keim said. “So, it sort of changed my thoughts a little bit about that position and how critical and how crucial it is to have a good center.”

Just as important is knowing full well what you’re getting, which is why the Cardinals attacked free agency the way they did this offseason. Instead of going on a shopping spree by adding multiple new faces in a spending frenzy, Arizona made it a point to re-sign many of its own players that helped the club to a 10-2 start just a year ago.

The Cardinals added some insurance and depth with newcomers such as cornerback Jeff Gladney, guard Will Hernandez, linebacker Nick Vigil and tight end Stephen Anderson. The bulk of their money, however, went to bringing back players like tight end Zach Ertz, running back James Conner, receiver A.J. Green and backup quarterback Colt McCoy.

“The positive is when you have the opportunity to resign your own players, you already know what you’re getting,” Keim said, adding, “You know what you’re getting in terms of preparation, work ethic, attention to detail. That’s the hardest part about free agency is it’s not like college scouting where you get all the background information, and you talk. Unless a coach has coached a player at another team, generally you’re making some big commitments based off what you see on tape, which is difficult because you don’t know much about the person.”