Big Cat Country
Head Coach Liam Coen and General Manager James Gladstone both met with the assembled media prior to next week's NFL Draft.
The Jacksonville Jaguars’ new front office have spent the past week getting acclimated with players and their scouting team in-house, as the staff puts the final touches on their draft board. Meanwhile the players and coaches have been progressing through phase one of their inaugural offseason program: their opening two weeks of team meetings, strength and conditioning, and player rehabilitation.
Head Coach Liam Coen took to the podium, together with General Manager James Gladstone to discuss their final thoughts prior to next week's NFL Draft.
Here are a few takeaways from their combined media availability:
Full Media Availability:
Not a “normal” draft process?
For a Jacksonville Jaguars organization that prioritizes intangibles slightly more than other teams, the process of how those intangibles is weighted, when setting the draft board then can become a key question. When asked about his current process, Gladstone explained:
“It’s been very impressive, the adaptability of that [scouting] group. To say, hey, here are the items we’re emphasizing, and we’ll be prioritizing, may look a little different than what you’re used to. To be able to see them pivot away from maybe things they held at a premium in the past, that flexibility has really stood out to me amongst the group.”
As Gladstone was hired a little later into the draft evaluation process, he was also asked about the difficulty of acclimating himself with the pre-existing scouting department and infusing his philosophies into their prior processes.
“There are some specific efficiencies that we’ve been able to sort of fold into the process. In large part there’s a good bit of information already at our disposal and a lot of internal knowledge that already exists that’s really helpful. Having our scouting staff on-site for the first time this week, all being under the same roof, it was really cool. We got a chance to sit down yesterday and chop through a large chunk of the prospects and got a chance to share with them my impressions of day one with them.”
With multiple years of pre-draft work one this class already done by a prior general manager, but based on different philosophies and priorities, Gladstone has been working through the challenge of recalibrating the prior assessments without the help of his prior in-house analytics and communication systems in Los Angeles (JAARS).
Enter Senior Vice President of Football Analytics Jake Temme. Teeme was recently brought to Jacksonville from the Los Angeles Rams, where he was previously the Director, Data and Analytics, helping to build the original JAARS system in Los Angeles. In the interim, there will obviously be a lingering question of how much will this draft class have the feel of James Gladstone, with much of the scouting staff, process, and pre-draft work being completed by a prior regime.
This young team will likely get even younger, soon
While the early rounds of...
