With four months between the end of the college football season and the draft, there’s a temptation in some NFL front offices to get too wrapped up in evaluating players in shorts and T-shirts in the spring, and forgetting what those same players did in helmets and shoulder pads in the fall.
Jaguars G.M. Gene Smith says his team will avoid that trap.
“I think you have to trust the tape,” Smith says in a Q&A at Jaguars.com. “You always have to back to the tape. You have to go back to the weight of what your talent grade should be – that’s how they play the game, how productive of a player are they?”
We’ve previously noted that Smith has no intention of trading up to draft a quarterback, and his comments to the team’s web site expand upon Jacksonville’s approach: The Jaguars are happy to stay where they are and select the best player available. And Smith says he never wants his college scouts thinking about the team’s needs -- he just wants scouts thinking about how good the players they’re evaluating are.
“When we go out in the fall as a scouting staff, we don’t sit down in training camp and say, ‘These are our needs,’” Smith said. “Needs can change daily. We want them to go out and grade the players for who they are. That, in itself, allows us to go out and accurately grade players. If you have this mindset that you’re grading to a need you tend to skew grades. That’s what we don’t want to do. We grade players for who they are and stay with the value line.”
