Link: The Importance of Team Visits
With Mark Sanchez having made a visit with the Jets this week, we thought the tie-in to Ross Tucker’s article stressing the importance of personal workouts in the draft process on SI.com.
The second part of the final evaluations taking place across the league, the team visit, is much more important if you ask me. Teams are able to bring up to 30 players into their facility in an effort to get to know them better before making a decision. The premium during these encounters is placed upon trying to get to know the prospect’s character, passion for the game and football intelligence … because the NFL is so complicated that players have to be able to keep up mentally or else they will fall by the wayside. Missed assignments are devastating at any level, but in the NFL they can often be the difference between wins and losses. If you aren’t ready for the complex schemes that are a big part of being an NFL player, these visits can expose you.
This is how the Jets have systematically over the past four years selected players like D’Brickashaw Ferguson, Nick Mangold, Darrelle Revis, David Harris, Vernon Gholston and Dustin Keller. They know the kind of guy they’re getting and the team can determine long-term if this is the type of player that will be a help or hindrance to this team or make trouble should they find success or want to walk from the organization rather than re-sign.
Glad you posted this, Bassett, because the media usually talks a lot more about Pro Days and the Combine than team visits, but it seems the team visits are absolutely critical for first-round picks. Who knows if the Sanchez visit will mean anything for who we pick, but it would certainly have said something if we *hadn’t* done a visit with him.