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By Nick Wagoner/Senior Writer
http://www.stlouisrams.com/news-and-eve ... cdad47b701
Rams general manager Les Snead will lead the Rams contingent at this week's NFL Scouting Combine.
INDIANAPOLIS – With new leadership in the form of general manager Les Snead and head coach Jeff Fisher still getting acclimated to their new home, the Rams personnel department will head east today to the NFL’s annual Scouting Combine.
There, the Rams and the other 31 NFL teams will have an all access pass to 327 of the top prospects for this year’s NFL Draft with physical workouts, medical checkups and player interviews on the docket.
The scouting combine has become one of the marquee events on the NFL’s offseason calendar but what might be deemed most valuable to an outsider is actually the least important part of this week for team.
While 40-yard dash times, bench press repetitions and other physical tests draw most of the attention, those are the things that register least with teams, including the Rams.
“The physical portion of the combine, the on the field things are the least important,” Snead said. “We are looking for football players and they are not playing football at the combine. What that does do is maybe confirm some things. It may lead to some questions that you’ll have to go back and say ‘OK, am I seeing it right on the football field or not?’ But trust me on this; the evaluations of the football player will come on the football field and not in drills at the combine.”
Snead has only been on the job for little more than a week while Fisher has been around close to a month but has been spending most of his time focusing on hiring a coaching staff.
That hasn’t left much time for Snead and Fisher to get caught up to speed with the scouts on both the pro and college sides and has made for a hectic past week.
Upon Snead’s hiring, in fact, the scouts all returned to St. Louis for a round of meetings with the coaching staff and Snead himself in an effort to get up to speed and begin speaking the same language.
Long term, Snead has an idea of how he’ll want things to work within the department and Fisher will as well but for now, there’s simply not enough time for a drastic overhaul of how things will work as the team heads to Lucas Oil Stadium and the Circle City for the week.
“It’s easier for us to learn their language than he and I to teach them our language at this point in the process,” Snead said. “But in this process we do have to implement and teach them the one, two, three, four things we really deem important to make sure they know what we want. I think that was done. In the NFL, there’s a lot of ways to skin a cat so I think as our scouts learn what coach wants in his players for his schemes to be successful, they can then re-think how they evaluate a player that might not have fit in the previous scheme.”
Having been around a bit longer, Fisher has enjoyed the opportunity to get to know the scouts and relished the chance to talk football and prospects with them in the pre-combine meetings last week.
“You have to trust your scouts,” Fisher said. “The scouts do a great job. They're fun to talk to. They're the guys that are talking to trainers and high school coaches, and digging out all the information. This is the culmination of all their hard work. They've done a great job. So we don't change things. You're still getting the information, you're still getting opinions, you're still getting the grades, and you’re still getting all the character descriptions.”
This week in Indianapolis, the focus of Snead, Fisher and their staffs will be on a couple of things that have little to do with guys running around in shorts and t shirts.
The real focus of the combine is on the medical information and the individual interview process that can best be described as the NFL’s version of speed dating.
First and foremost, it’s about the medical checkups. The beauty of the combine is that it allows for all of the top prospects and all of the respective medical staffs to converge on one spot. From a logistics and financial standpoint, it’s a godsend for teams to get to take an in depth look at every player’s current and past medical history.
“Generally speaking, you are able to take every team’s medical staff to one city, fly the top prospects into that city and then from that standpoint do a physical on them and figure out how healthy or not they are,” Snead said. “Logistically speaking, it’s great. All the good players, all the team doctors in one spot.”
Each day, the league divides the players into position groups and takes them to a local hospital for checkups and meetings with the teams’ respective medical staffs. Those hospital visits can last for as long as eight hours depending on the player.
When that’s complete, the teams turn their attention to their first real chance to get to know the players in attendance. That comes from a series of interviews that have previously been set up.
Most teams will make an effort to interview as many players as possible during the course of the week.
Per league rules, each team only gets 15 minutes with each player. Those interviews take place at a local hotel and are monitored by the NFL. When those 15 minutes expire, there’s an alarm that goes off and a new player shuffles in.
For Fisher, it’s the chance to get to know the players that carries the most weight.
“It's the interview process,” Fisher said. “And it's not just the 15-minute. 60-max interviews. What's more important is the opportunity to go spend some time with a player outside of that interview room. They get pretty good at answering questions. That No. 1, and secondly is the medical information the medical staff gets.”
For the interview process, the Rams have already formulated a plan which gives each interview its own personality. Some interviews will be geared more toward answering character or intangible questions, some focus on the ability to learn football by putting the player on a whiteboard with a marker to draw X’s and O’s and other might be more focused on finding out how the player fits into the ideal culture of the organization.
“Every single player we interview, there will be a specific game plan tailored for that player,” Snead said. “So we as a team only get 15 minutes with that player so we are going to go in and try to discuss the one, two or three hot topics on each player and those will likely be different elements. But each player has a different game plan. In that brief amount of time that we have with them, we will not solve all of the problems or answer all of the questions. What that will do is give us a game plan for the spring on who we need to go see, who we need to bring in and who we need to do further work on.”
The other, less talked about part of the combine that is important is the initial conversations that teams might begin having about free agency.
While league tampering rules prevent any substantive talks about those players, the reality is that with players, agents, scouts, and personnel executives all in one place, those conversations are simply a part of the deal.
This year, things might be a little different, too. The schedule has a different look this year.
Under normal circumstances, free agency begins only a day or two after the combine ends. This year, the franchise tag period has only just begun and free agency isn’t set to begin until March 13.
This is the first year there’s been that type of separation so teams will have to see how it plays out but on the surface Snead believes it will be good to have a little bit of a cooling off period between the two events.
“I do think it’s going to be very helpful,” Snead said. “I think when you are about to make major investments in players in free agency and you take off to the combine on a Wednesday and you get back on a Tuesday and maybe on a Friday it all kicks in, long story short, I’d rather focus on the college and come back and have those two weeks to refocus on the free agency and then attack. I think this is going to be really beneficial.”
http://www.stlouisrams.com/news-and-eve ... cdad47b701
Rams general manager Les Snead will lead the Rams contingent at this week's NFL Scouting Combine.
INDIANAPOLIS – With new leadership in the form of general manager Les Snead and head coach Jeff Fisher still getting acclimated to their new home, the Rams personnel department will head east today to the NFL’s annual Scouting Combine.
There, the Rams and the other 31 NFL teams will have an all access pass to 327 of the top prospects for this year’s NFL Draft with physical workouts, medical checkups and player interviews on the docket.
The scouting combine has become one of the marquee events on the NFL’s offseason calendar but what might be deemed most valuable to an outsider is actually the least important part of this week for team.
While 40-yard dash times, bench press repetitions and other physical tests draw most of the attention, those are the things that register least with teams, including the Rams.
“The physical portion of the combine, the on the field things are the least important,” Snead said. “We are looking for football players and they are not playing football at the combine. What that does do is maybe confirm some things. It may lead to some questions that you’ll have to go back and say ‘OK, am I seeing it right on the football field or not?’ But trust me on this; the evaluations of the football player will come on the football field and not in drills at the combine.”
Snead has only been on the job for little more than a week while Fisher has been around close to a month but has been spending most of his time focusing on hiring a coaching staff.
That hasn’t left much time for Snead and Fisher to get caught up to speed with the scouts on both the pro and college sides and has made for a hectic past week.
Upon Snead’s hiring, in fact, the scouts all returned to St. Louis for a round of meetings with the coaching staff and Snead himself in an effort to get up to speed and begin speaking the same language.
Long term, Snead has an idea of how he’ll want things to work within the department and Fisher will as well but for now, there’s simply not enough time for a drastic overhaul of how things will work as the team heads to Lucas Oil Stadium and the Circle City for the week.
“It’s easier for us to learn their language than he and I to teach them our language at this point in the process,” Snead said. “But in this process we do have to implement and teach them the one, two, three, four things we really deem important to make sure they know what we want. I think that was done. In the NFL, there’s a lot of ways to skin a cat so I think as our scouts learn what coach wants in his players for his schemes to be successful, they can then re-think how they evaluate a player that might not have fit in the previous scheme.”
Having been around a bit longer, Fisher has enjoyed the opportunity to get to know the scouts and relished the chance to talk football and prospects with them in the pre-combine meetings last week.
“You have to trust your scouts,” Fisher said. “The scouts do a great job. They're fun to talk to. They're the guys that are talking to trainers and high school coaches, and digging out all the information. This is the culmination of all their hard work. They've done a great job. So we don't change things. You're still getting the information, you're still getting opinions, you're still getting the grades, and you’re still getting all the character descriptions.”
This week in Indianapolis, the focus of Snead, Fisher and their staffs will be on a couple of things that have little to do with guys running around in shorts and t shirts.
The real focus of the combine is on the medical information and the individual interview process that can best be described as the NFL’s version of speed dating.
First and foremost, it’s about the medical checkups. The beauty of the combine is that it allows for all of the top prospects and all of the respective medical staffs to converge on one spot. From a logistics and financial standpoint, it’s a godsend for teams to get to take an in depth look at every player’s current and past medical history.
“Generally speaking, you are able to take every team’s medical staff to one city, fly the top prospects into that city and then from that standpoint do a physical on them and figure out how healthy or not they are,” Snead said. “Logistically speaking, it’s great. All the good players, all the team doctors in one spot.”
Each day, the league divides the players into position groups and takes them to a local hospital for checkups and meetings with the teams’ respective medical staffs. Those hospital visits can last for as long as eight hours depending on the player.
When that’s complete, the teams turn their attention to their first real chance to get to know the players in attendance. That comes from a series of interviews that have previously been set up.
Most teams will make an effort to interview as many players as possible during the course of the week.
Per league rules, each team only gets 15 minutes with each player. Those interviews take place at a local hotel and are monitored by the NFL. When those 15 minutes expire, there’s an alarm that goes off and a new player shuffles in.
For Fisher, it’s the chance to get to know the players that carries the most weight.
“It's the interview process,” Fisher said. “And it's not just the 15-minute. 60-max interviews. What's more important is the opportunity to go spend some time with a player outside of that interview room. They get pretty good at answering questions. That No. 1, and secondly is the medical information the medical staff gets.”
For the interview process, the Rams have already formulated a plan which gives each interview its own personality. Some interviews will be geared more toward answering character or intangible questions, some focus on the ability to learn football by putting the player on a whiteboard with a marker to draw X’s and O’s and other might be more focused on finding out how the player fits into the ideal culture of the organization.
“Every single player we interview, there will be a specific game plan tailored for that player,” Snead said. “So we as a team only get 15 minutes with that player so we are going to go in and try to discuss the one, two or three hot topics on each player and those will likely be different elements. But each player has a different game plan. In that brief amount of time that we have with them, we will not solve all of the problems or answer all of the questions. What that will do is give us a game plan for the spring on who we need to go see, who we need to bring in and who we need to do further work on.”
The other, less talked about part of the combine that is important is the initial conversations that teams might begin having about free agency.
While league tampering rules prevent any substantive talks about those players, the reality is that with players, agents, scouts, and personnel executives all in one place, those conversations are simply a part of the deal.
This year, things might be a little different, too. The schedule has a different look this year.
Under normal circumstances, free agency begins only a day or two after the combine ends. This year, the franchise tag period has only just begun and free agency isn’t set to begin until March 13.
This is the first year there’s been that type of separation so teams will have to see how it plays out but on the surface Snead believes it will be good to have a little bit of a cooling off period between the two events.
“I do think it’s going to be very helpful,” Snead said. “I think when you are about to make major investments in players in free agency and you take off to the combine on a Wednesday and you get back on a Tuesday and maybe on a Friday it all kicks in, long story short, I’d rather focus on the college and come back and have those two weeks to refocus on the free agency and then attack. I think this is going to be really beneficial.”
