Rams are scouting new ways to evaluate players
The scene used to be as reliable a feature of NFL draft season as boos for the commissioner and size-60 suits on smiling young men.
A college football field in early spring. A player running for his professional life in a 40-yard dash. A pack of grim-faced pro scouts poised at the finish, each with a stopwatch.
J.W. Jordan, the Rams’ director of draft management, laughs when he talks about all the times he saw that – and did that – in the nearly two decades he has been involved in the draft.
“Those hundredths of seconds,” Jordan said of the fine differences in 40 times that some scouts obsess over. “Does it matter in how good a football player is, or how much he can help you? No.”
The Rams are going a different direction, fast.
As they prep for the April 29May 1 draft, the Rams are among the NFL clubs pulling back significantly on travel by scouts, coaches and executives and other in-person detective work like face-to-face meetings with prospective picks.
Some of those changes happened because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which knocked all scouts off the road before the 2020 draft and forced cancellation of many colleges’ “pro days” in 2020 and the NFL scouting combine last year and this year.
But Rams executives say the experience of gathering information about players under pandemic restraints in 2020 only confirmed what they’d been thinking already, questioning the value of the old ways and wondering if they were attending those talent showcases only because that’s what everybody had always done.
Rams personnel used to attend most of each year’s approximately 100 pro days. This year, the team sent someone to only about a dozen pro days, Jordan said. And the club shows no sign of going back to the routine of pre-pandemic prospect visits, preferring video-conference meetings.
This, after the Rams sent no scouts to college games in the season that ended in January.
“I think for every pro day attended, there should be a specific reason,” Rams general manager Les Snead said in March. “Maybe the case or the file on (a particular) player isn’t complete yet. Is there anything that we can get from a pro day to complete that file?”
None of it is unique to the Rams. Chargers coach Brandon Staley, the Rams’ defensive coordinator in 2020, said none of his staff attended pro days this year. Staley said they get more done at the Chargers’ home base.
That’s the key: To the Rams, having fewer scouting trips and in-person meetings is not merely a cheaper, more efficient (and coronavirus-safe) way to do an equally effective job; less travel actually makes talent evaluators effective.
Less time spent on highways or in the air leaves more time to watch more college game tape of more players.
That’s especially useful for the Rams. As the draft order stands, they have no first-round pick for the fifth year in a row. The success of their draft can depend on how accurately they’ve assessed players available in rounds 2-7.
“We’ll know the second-, third-, fourth-, fifth-round targets as well as or better than we ever have, just because of the opportunities to dive deep into film,” Jordan said. “We feel a lot better about (those evaluations) going in.”
The Rams have 15-20 employees prepping for the draft year-round, and about 50 involved once coaches and others join the effort closer to the event. That includes eight regionally based college scouts. College scouting director Brad Holmes left in January to become the Lions’ GM, and his position hasn’t been filled yet.
Pulling together data from all those people and turning it into cogent opinions about potential draft picks is the job for Jordan, 42, a former Notre Dame center and guard who came to the Rams in 2012 from the Colts’ player personnel department.
Jordan has a finance degree from Notre Dame and is one of five children of Jay Jordan, founder of the private equity firm the Jordan Company. The father made a $75 million donation to Notre Dame in 2014.
John Weaver Jordan III was drawn to a football executive career by “the puzzle of team-building.”
Going into his 19th draft, Jordan marvels at how much has changed, most notably in the area of technology and statistics. This amount of video-watching would have been impossible in pre-digital years when tapes arrived by snail mail, and not timing 40s with your own thumb would have been unwise before everybody began receiving electronic clockings.
When Jordan thinks of the value of watching games — or game video — instead of stopwatches, he thinks of Cooper Kupp. The Rams’ leading receiver the past two seasons was drafted from Eastern Washington in 2017 in the third round. He ran a less-than-sizzling 4.62-second 40, but the Rams remembered an eight-catch, 145-yard, three-touchdown game he had as a sophomore against a Washington secondary with Marcus Peters, Budda Baker and Kevin King.
“Who is this little guy at Eastern Washington who’s killing firstround picks?” Weaver remembers thinking. “You just realized he’s incredibly instinctive, very quick, catches everything, has a natural feel for gaining extra yards after the catch.”
If Kupp run a fast 40, he wouldn’t have been available to the Rams with the 69th pick.
The Rams have the 57th (second round) and five later picks in this month’s draft, which will be staged in Cleveland, with some players in attendance but many participating remotely and all teams making selections electronically from their home cities.
The Rams announced Monday that Snead, McVay and others will make picks from a “draft house” in Malibu.
Rams chief operating officer Kevin Demoff said figuring out new ways is a benefit of Snead, coach Sean McVay and others having worked together for five drafts now, which itself is a byproduct of four consecutive winning seasons.
“The more you can do well, stay together as a group, learn what works, the more you can continue to refine those processes rather than starting over,” Demoff said this month. “They’re able to tighten up each year.”