Last year at this time, the Arizona Cardinals’ current brain trust had been through a three-month whirlwind.
There was the hiring of general manager Monti Ossenfort and head coach Jonathan Gannon, putting new processes in place from a personnel and coaching standpoint, and simply getting to know each other.
Ossenfort inherited personnel executives and scouts, while implementing the way he wanted things done. There have been some changes, along with a certain level of continuity.
Now, one week away from the draft, Ossenfort was asked Thursday how the adjustment has gone.
“We talked about this a little bit last year of how it was going to be a gradual process and there were going to be things that were different,” he said. “The timing of different meetings, different processes and structures in place that we were going to ask of our scouts to do: our pro scouts, our college scouts and our analytics group. What we were able to do this past year is we were able to put a lot of those in place. I think the timing of when things happened during the year where we had our December scout meetings, then we had our February scout meetings, and we had our April process and then we got the coaches involved.
“I think everything has fallen into place timing wise. Didn’t change the volume of work, it didn’t change what we had to do, it didn’t change the end product of where we were trying to get to, but I think everybody knowing, having a clearer picture, going through it once last year and finally how it ended up this year. The process was just much smoother and much more efficient than it was last year.”
That is expected to result in a very productive 48 hours beginning at 5 pm Arizona time next Thursday.
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