GM James Gladstone discussed on Tuesday why the Jaguars won’t be having official 30 pre-draft visits.
In the month-plus leading up to the NFL draft each year, we see report after report of teams hosting prospects on official 30 visits. However, this year, under GM James Gladstone, it’s been crickets in that regard for the Jacksonville Jaguars.
For just about every team, these visits are a crucial part of the pre-draft process. But not for the Jaguars?
“I think there’s a lot of layers to not doing those facility visits that you all are probably accustomed to, or those top 30 visits, as they’re phrased,” Gladstone said on Tuesday. “But that goes back a while for me and my experience. Just think about, let’s take it this direction, the implicit bias that can come to life this late in the process, the last player you might sit down with, and how that might differ from the first player you sit down with, knowing that it’s closer to the decision that’s upcoming.”
Each year, teams can host up to 30 draft-eligible prospects at their facilities as part of the pre-draft process. These can be prospects who are first-rounders, UDFAs, and anywhere in between.
In most instances, when teams have a prospect in, it’s because they have a question or two that’s unanswered when it comes to the scouting report they’ve put together. So those meetings allow teams to walk through film with the prospect, go through medical checks, and get to know them off the field.
“In addition to that,” Gladstone added, “so much of the work that’s done in preparation for these decisions starts years in advance. The sourced intel from those who have lived with these individuals is likely to be more accurate than me sitting down with a prospect for a short period of time and attempting to dissect who that human being is. So I don’t view myself as having this extreme superpower of deciphering the complexity of a person in an hour, right?
“I would probably say I can work that in tandem. But there are other mechanisms that we tend to lean into to help us determine whether or not a player is, in fact, a fit for us more than just a singular touch point that would be a top 30 visit. We have a lot of additional mechanisms that we deploy that don’t necessarily put us at risk for the rest of the world to know which direction we’re heading as well, because so often those become public-facing touch points, at which point you’re sacrificing some version of strategy come draft day as well.”
Gladstone would mention later on that the sourced information, how a prospect plays on film, and some in-house mechanisms that he didn’t want to give away help the Jaguars evaluate which players meet that intangibly rich threshold they are looking to bring in.
As Ian Rapoport mentioned, this practice of not hosting prospects on 30 visits or holding pre-draft workouts is how the LA Rams have operated under GM Les Snead, and that, of course, is where Gladstone was previously. In recent years, the Rams have had some of the most impactful draft classes around the NFL.