Month: April 2009

It’s always interesting to me that in many cases, the skill sets that lead to eye-popping productivity in college football don’t translate to the NFL. In evaluating some of the top performers in college football, every NFL team decided that some were not worthy of even a low-round draft pick.

The players who stand out are quarterbacks Graham Harrell of Texas Tech and Chase Daniel of Missouri and running back Ian Johnson of Boise State. In the cases of Harrell and Daniel, the receivers they threw to, Michael Crabtree and Jeremy Maclin, will make millions, having been drafted among the top 19 selections. Harrell and Daniel did not get drafted, however, landing in Cleveland and Washington, respectively, for a few thousand dollars as products of the undrafted free-agent frenzy Sunday night. Johnson, as famous for his nationally televised marriage proposal as for his great production as a running back, will report to the Vikings as an undrafted free agent.

I understand the natural reaction to the magnitude of the contract the Lions gave to Matthew Stafford, the top pick in this year’s draft, but perhaps the hysteria over rookie salaries should be toned down a bit. Mind you, we are rightfully dismayed at the eye-popping numbers of this contract, yet its size is not a surprise to anyone in the industry.

Most of the trading during the draft — and there’s plenty of it — 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 two-day marathon, the action really starts 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.</p>

I’ve always said there must be a better way for undrafted free agents to sign with their new employers. The way it is now, players and agents are called by teams needing to know if they’re signing up while they have other players on hold. Players – at least the ones in demand – may have up to five or six teams on hold waiting for an answer while they have to decide in minutes on their future employer. Teams may drop off as other players need to make decisions while on hold. Teams need answers; players need answers; somehow, this jumble of decisions produces from 6-12 players per team with signing bonuses from zero up to $35,000 for the players most in demand.

As for a better way, perhaps there could be the introduction of a system similar to the way I understand medical residents are matched with their future employer hospitals. In this system, players would submit their top five desired teams (just as medical students submit their top resident hospital venues), while teams would submit their top five undrafted free agents (as hospitals submit their medical resident choices), and a computer could match up teams and players in a high-tech version of the dating game. It sounds novel but could probably work better than the current Wild West system we now have.

Making the signing of these players even more chaotic is the fact that people who don’t negotiate contracts for teams throughout the year are now set loose to bring in these players, using the recruiting tools of past undrafted players who made the roster and some signing bonus money. Like any negotiation or decision, agents and players who have prepared are best served, although their preparation may not have included the depth chart created by players the team has just drafted.

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. It never ends.

One of the biggest 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. Every team has a bragging-rights story about how it could not believe the player it found in a particular round was still there, and in many cases, it’s telling the truth.

I would man the phones with agents, trying to glean information but, more often than not, listen patiently as they told me they could not believe that no one had picked their player yet. Outside of those selected in the top of the first round, I have rarely talked to a player or agent who didn’t feel the player should have been drafted higher. Usually, when we selected a player in the later rounds, the agent had been doing everything in his power to keep the player from lashing out, as most are apoplectic by that point that they had not been selected yet. Ego and insecurity are inevitable staples of draft weekend.

At the Packers, whenever we made a pick, we would always call the player first to, as Ron Wolf would always say, “make sure he’s still alive.” (I’m not sure if this came from an experience in which he knew of someone drafting a dead guy). Everyone we picked was still alive, although there were times we had trouble finding the player. I remember in 2005 when none of us, including his agent, could locate a player we were about to take in the sixth round. We were about to change our selection when, at that very moment, a defensive end from Texas A&M named Mike Montgomery finally answered his phone and confirmed that he was alive and well. The player we didn’t select? No worries, Packers fans, he never made it in the league.

I would call the agent for every player to acknowledge the selection and say I looked forward to negotiating the contract with him. After hearing how lucky we were to get his player, the agent would usually ask me about other players that were waiting for the call. I would tell him it was not the time for that.

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. We experienced that in Green Bay with Aaron Rodgers, a selection cheered by some but booed lustily by others since he would not contribute right away, and in 2007 with Justin Harrell. In 2006, however, when we selected A.J. Hawk at the top of the draft, he flew in immediately, met the public and the press, and entered into an agreement to buy a house (he was my neighbor) all in one day.

Working the draft, as I said above, is about pacing oneself, 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 ebb and flow of the weekend. And none of this involves the task that the person is hired – and evaluated – to do: actually select the players. That’s another reason why “trusting the board” is so important.

The common wisdom about players and agents is that if an agent tells a player he can get him drafted higher simply by virtue of having him as his agent, then the player should run the other way. This is what I have believed in the overwhelming majority of players, as has my colleague and partner at the Post, agent Jack Bechta.

However, something happened this week that slightly deflates that conventional wisdom.

The War Room. The mere mention of these words connotes power and significance. I remember the days, weeks and months following the tragedy of September 11 when it was considered inappropriate to use such metaphors, and these rooms were simply called draft rooms. As with most things, however, the sensitivity has since faded (despite our country still being at war), and the moniker of War Room for NFL draft headquarters has returned in full — pardon the pun — force.

At the Packers, we actually had two War Rooms. There was one room 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, Wunderlic score, agent, etc. We also had a Financial War Room that I designed featuring the necessary statistics on all NFL players in the league from a Cap and cash standpoint — 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. Whenever we gave VIPs a tour of the facility, our Cap Room (as opposed to Cap room) drew particular interest, especially from Commissioners Paul Tagliabue and Roger Goodell and Players Association executive director Gene Upshaw, who followed up with a request that we advise the union on the design of a similar room at its headquarters.

As for the traditional draft War Room, it was 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. (That's me at the bottom left in blue).

I’m told that the setup in the room we had in Green Bay is quite similar throughout the league. Typically, the lead decision-maker – the general manager or head coach/general manager (I have experienced both) — sits at either the head of the table or in front of the draft board listing all the players (the board), flanked by his most trusted 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.

As to additional personnel populating the room, flanked somewhere near the personnel people are the Cap/contract person, which I was – 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. Thus, the scene is set.

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. Of course, ownership – or, in the case of the Packers, members of the Board of Directors – is usually present on these weekends, although most exit stage right soon after the top pick is made. And now media access has become much more in vogue, with War Room cams throughout the league and assorted media allowed to document the events.

While there are dramatic consequences with the decisions being made on these two days, the decision-makers whom I’ve watched, including Ron Wolf, Mike Sherman and Ted Thompson, tend to be very relaxed as the draft begins, understanding the two days require great stamina and the pace of a marathon rather than a sprint. All the work has been done — players have been poked, prodded, quizzed, paraded in front of scouts in their gym shorts, analyzed, discussed, and analyzed and discussed some more for the past seven months. Now it’s time to let the board do the bulk of the work, or, at least, that’s what should happen.