Plankton
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https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/31209852/nfl-draft-board-building-101-secretive-yearlong-grind
It is universal. It is unique.
It is stacked, adjusted and set. It is mocked, remocked and mocked again.
But unless you are one of the cooks in the proverbial football kitchen, you haven't seen it. It is the stew that everyone in the NFL makes and whose recipe is hidden from anyone outside the family.
It is the NFL draft board, a place where player rankings are handed out, complete with concerns, questions and the sometimes tenuous hope of finding the league's next big star.
And contrary to the notion of a "draft season," the blueprint to each team's draft weekend is a year in the making.
Yet how the NFL draft board is built, how it looks and what is on it -- names, symbols, grades -- isn't really a topic for conversation outside the conference rooms or laptops where the boards are hidden.
How secretive is it? Just before the 2000 draft, when the Tennessee Titans had the 30th pick in the first round, then-Titans general manager Floyd Reese was asked who the 30th player on his board was, to which he replied, "Well, that's one of my favorites, looking real hard there, that would be the guy between 'None Of' and 'Your Damn Business.'"
To build the board, no one is above asking for guidance from myriad sources, be they human, data or spiritual.
"[Hall of Fame team executive] Ron Wolf would always let me put something on the draft board that was blessed by the pope," said Bryan Broaddus, who worked in the scouting departments of the Eagles, Packers and Cowboys during his career. The item was something small enough it could fit in a plastic bag, but it had a papal blessing. "After the first year we did it, it was just kind of accepted after that. You'll take all the help you can get and it went on the top of the board.
"Sometimes I would just sit there, in the room, with all those names and just wish, somehow, the future Hall of Famers would just light up, so then you would know. You just want to get it right."
It is universal. It is unique.
It is stacked, adjusted and set. It is mocked, remocked and mocked again.
But unless you are one of the cooks in the proverbial football kitchen, you haven't seen it. It is the stew that everyone in the NFL makes and whose recipe is hidden from anyone outside the family.
It is the NFL draft board, a place where player rankings are handed out, complete with concerns, questions and the sometimes tenuous hope of finding the league's next big star.
And contrary to the notion of a "draft season," the blueprint to each team's draft weekend is a year in the making.
Yet how the NFL draft board is built, how it looks and what is on it -- names, symbols, grades -- isn't really a topic for conversation outside the conference rooms or laptops where the boards are hidden.
How secretive is it? Just before the 2000 draft, when the Tennessee Titans had the 30th pick in the first round, then-Titans general manager Floyd Reese was asked who the 30th player on his board was, to which he replied, "Well, that's one of my favorites, looking real hard there, that would be the guy between 'None Of' and 'Your Damn Business.'"
To build the board, no one is above asking for guidance from myriad sources, be they human, data or spiritual.
"[Hall of Fame team executive] Ron Wolf would always let me put something on the draft board that was blessed by the pope," said Bryan Broaddus, who worked in the scouting departments of the Eagles, Packers and Cowboys during his career. The item was something small enough it could fit in a plastic bag, but it had a papal blessing. "After the first year we did it, it was just kind of accepted after that. You'll take all the help you can get and it went on the top of the board.
"Sometimes I would just sit there, in the room, with all those names and just wish, somehow, the future Hall of Famers would just light up, so then you would know. You just want to get it right."