Draft day can be daunting for first-timers
By Randy Mueller
ESPN Insider
With a lot of the draft talk this year centering on the lack of consensus at the top of the first round as far as players are concerned, another point of note is the lack of a track record for those people who are actually doing the selecting.
The top three teams on this year's draft board – San Francisco, Miami and Cleveland – all sport new head coaches, and two of the three also have new personnel chiefs. That being said, the obvious fact jumps out at you: Their next draft selections will be the first picks they've ever made purely on their own.
Speaking from experience, the reality of this fact can be a very sobering thought on draft-day morning. No doubt it has been a lifelong dream of every assistant coach to become a head coach and every scout to become a general manager. Having been in that chair before, I'm here to say, be careful what you wish for. When draft day dawns, they will feel the first bit of pressure that comes with these jobs.
No worries though. Sure, they might wear a slightly different hat this time around, but Phil Savage, the Browns' new GM, and Scott McCloughan, the 49ers' VP of player personnel, both are experienced at putting together draft boards. They're also much more comfortable on the college scouting front than on the pro scouting side, which both have endured with free agency for the past two months.
With the draft, there are no salary cap meetings and no more recruiting and entertaining prospective free agents. Now it's time to line up the names in the order you like them and pick the players who will most help you build your organization. Both Savage and McCloughan cut their teeth in the business on the road as college scouts, so they feel most at home in draft meetings and when stacking their board. This is their time to shine.
I experienced a similar circumstance when leaving Seattle after the 1999 season and hiring a completely new coaching staff in New Orleans in February of 2000. The biggest part of the learning curve for me was evaluating the evaluators. New scouts, new coaches, new schemes all are part of making the right selection on draft day. My point is that sometimes it takes a couple of years to get to know your people and how they evaluate. I was fortunate that I was able to bring some key people with me from Seattle who were very good at their jobs and understood the scouting systems we would implement, so the learning curve was short.
The college draft is a giant organizational job with a lot of moving parts. I found that juggling schedules, opinions, meetings and workouts was very much part of the bigger picture of team building within your own building. It's maybe the most enjoyable, yet hectic, time of year for those of us in the NFL personnel business. This frantic pace brought us together quickly as a staff and was exhilarating beyond description each and every year. The process parallels that of a coaching staff game-planning for a Sunday afternoon playoff game. Only this game plan takes 363 days to put together and after the two days spent drafting, immediately will start over again for next year.
These three teams at the top, each of which has hired a new staff over the past couple of months, are balancing the installation of schemes on both sides of the ball, mini-camp and offseason programs and, oh by the way, free agency and the college draft. It can be overwhelming, and I can remember many 20-hour days. In San Francisco, Miami and Cleveland, adrenaline has been running wild for the last couple of months. The No. 1 chore these new personnel and coaching staffs might have had to master is that of learning how to sleep fast.
http://insider.espn.go.com/nfl/draft05/ ... id=2038028