Gumbo
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- Mar 19, 2019
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The G.M. subcommittee privately (until someone leaked it) lobbied the NFL to postpone the draft on Tuesday. Saints G.M. Mickey Loomis is publicly doing so.
“I’d be personally in favor of delaying the draft, so that we could get some of the work done that our scouts and personnel people ordinarily do,” Loomis tells Peter King in the latest installment of the Peter King Podcast. “And then just the logistics of trying to conduct the draft with not having access to your draft rooms and your offices creates a lot of logistic problems. This is not a fantasy draft that you conduct out there with just a list of things on a piece of paper. There’s a lot of things that go into it to prepare, and there’s a lot of work that is done during the draft. Listen it’ll be very, very difficult to conduct that and do it in a way that you’re doing justice to the process.”
The G.M. subcommittee reportedly wants a delay due both to the incomplete nature of the information due to the COVID-19 pandemic and due to the fact that some states have “stay at home” orders and others don’t. (The NFL apparently reacted to the latter concern by shutting down all team facilities.)
“A large part of the information process hasn’t happened yet,” Loomis added. “And a lot of that gets done in the months of March and early part of April. And obviously we haven’t been able to do that. It doesn’t make it impossible, and yet it makes it much more of a gamble, much riskier than it would be ordinarily.”
But the risks will be the same for everyone, and if the draft proceeds as scheduled it ultimately will show which teams are good at making the most out of the least information. Or which teams are just lucky.
It probably will be the latter. The draft already is a crapshoot. Proceeding without complete information will make it even more crap than shoot. But given the league’s insistence on proceeding with free agency as scheduled, don’t bet that the league will do anything other than tell the various teams to deal with it.