The Redskins Blog

Tuesday Predraft Links

• David Elfin of the Washington Times uses the upcoming NFL Draft as an excuse to look back on one of the most lopsided trades in NFL history: the New Orleans Saints sending their entire 1999 draft to Washington for Ricky Williams. That certainly worked out well for the Saints.
• In the wake of the swirling Mark-Sanchez-dinner-with-the-Redskins reports, former Redskin Matt Bowen does an excellent job breaking down Sanchez’s meteoric rise up the draft charts for National Football Post — and explains why that rise raises some concerns.
• Speaking of Sanchez, First Cuts has the cover athletes for EA Sports’ upcoming NCAA Football 10 game, and two of them have been rumored as objects of the Redskins’ affections: Sanchez and Brian Orakpo.

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Tuesday, April 21: Predraft Talk With The Director Of Player Personnel

For the last two weeks, all the different people who take part in the scouting and drafting process — the personnel folks, the scouting staff, the coaches — have been holed up in draft meetings for hours each day. Every so often, they’d emerge from the meeting room in a pack, blinking in the bright lights, and take a fifteen minute break before heading back in for more work.

The worst of those meetings are over now, so I sat down with Director of Player Personnel Scott Campbell. Information is especially precious at this point in the drafting process, so we didn’t discuss specific players or strategies. But he did tell me where the process stands, how draft day trades affect scouting, and how players can shoot up and down mock draft boards like yoyos on a string.

All right: less than a week until the draft. Where in the process are you and your staff now?

Campbell: “Well, the scouts just finished up two weeks of the intense meetings, basically setting our board. And the scouts have left — they went home Friday night, they’ll be back Wednesday. When they get back, they’ll double-check and verify things like phone numbers and agents. They’ll get in touch with a lot of kids we have as priority free agent targets and start showing them interest, telling them that if they don’t get drafted, this is a place that we’d really love to have them come.

“With the volume of guys, it takes several days to do that, to get your foot in the door with a lot of the players.

“Here on the homefront with us, me and Vinny [Cerrato], the coaches, just met with the doctors, going over all the questions we had in terms of the medical reviews. Some of the kids have been rechecked from the Combine, and we want to know what their updated medical status is. And there’s a handful of players that were not invited to the combine that we needed medical information on, so we review those files. That’s kinda where we are into the weekend.

Those draft meetings really did seem to go on all day every day for two weeks. What’s actually happening in the room?
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