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The NFL’s decision to force teams to conduct the 2020 draft from home has raised anxiety and issues all around the league, but some of the more tech-savvy franchises have embraced the opportunity to innovate and help their personnel work more closely together.
Peter King of NBC Sports explained how the New Orleans Saints are one such outfit relying hard on teleconference technology to organize their war room ahead of this year’s draft:
Each team will have choices, but I talked to five over the weekend about the mechanics of it. The Saints, for instance, will have two videconferences working simultaneously. One will have GM Mickey Loomis, coach Sean Payton, assistant GM/college scouting director Jeff Ireland and VP/football administration Khai Hartley; the other will have those four people plus every scout.
The four-man group will be open for free discussion while the larger group will likely mostly be muted, with Loomis or Payton having the ability to unmute, say, the scouts with the most knowledge about a particular player. Say they want to pick LSU linebacker Patrick Queen in the first round; Loomis could ask the scouts who were at LSU the most in 2019 for their thoughts
This feels like the closest thing to the plan the Saints had originally crafted for this year’s virtual event. The Saints initially planned on placing that central braintrust of Payton, Loomis, Ireland, Hartley, and a few support staffers in the Dixie Brewery warehouse (property of Saints owner Gayle Benson) with their scouts and assistant coaches on deck, ready to jump in if their opinions were needed. Payton had previously said that the team intended to use a teleconference program like Zoom, Skype, or a similar service.
However, running two streams side-by-side like this seems a little superfluous. It’s possible the core Saints decision-makers want a separate channel to allow for more-confidential discussions (like debating possible trade offers), but the broader teleconference is structured like the war room would normally be conducted. Hopefully they won’t have any technical issues, or risk crossing the streams. It would be bad.
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