The Rams' unique strategy: 5 things to remember up to the NFL Draft

New York Times

14-04-2025

LOS ANGELES — The NFL Draft is next week, which means the Los Angeles Rams are nearly done with their process of meeting with scouts and coaches on strategy and closing arguments for or against prospects.
Right now, L.A. picks at No. 26 in the first round — a position general manager Les Snead has referred to (whenever in the 20s in general) as 'purgatory.' Snead and head coach Sean McVay will explore their options at the pick point, inclusive to trading back for more picks.
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The Rams, as most fans know by now, approach the draft and scouting process uniquely. Last season, I released a two-part series called 'Finding Rams' that illustrated a year spent with their scouting department to explain how, and why, they think about the draft the way they do. As we reach the peak of 'draft buzz season' in the final days before the first round begins, I thought it would be helpful to summarize a few key items to keep in mind about their methods:
Teams are allowed to host up to 30 prospects in their building for pre-draft visits each year and most bring in at least a few. The Rams do not. They don't send top executives or high-ranking coaches (including Snead and McVay) to private workouts, either. Instead, Snead deploys a few trusted scouts to spend a day with prospects the Rams want more information on at either their college or their high school (if the player is in their hometown), which the NFL allows. The '30' visits have to be reported to the league. Visits to the prospect within a 50-mile radius of their college or hometown do not, which is why the Rams' don't often leak. When a prospect is connected to a 'Rams visit' in the media after the combine into the third week of April, this is what it means. Andy Sugarman, Steve Miller and Kellen Clemens are all special assistants to the general manager and they are usually the scouts conducting these visits.
The Rams don't send the majority of their front office and scouting staff, nor any coaches, to All-Star offseason events such as the East-West Shrine Bowl, scouting combine or Senior Bowl. At the combine, the entire medical staff attends in order to get crucial and official medical information shared among the 32 teams. Some scouts attend the events, though do so under the radar (they don't use their booths in the testing stadiums, for example) and the key objective is to issue a personality test to players that was designed by internal experts with the team. The 28-question test takes players about six minutes to complete. The goal is to get about 300 tests completed and input into JAARS to be analyzed and weighed among other evaluations.
Most NFL teams have a data and information processing system, usually constructed in-house, into which scouts, coaches, medical staff, front-office executives and others input notes on players (you might be surprised to learn that some teams don't!).
The Rams call theirs a 'Joint After-Action Review System,' or JAARS. It was built over a decade ago by former director of data and analytics Jake Temme and developer Ryan Garlisch. JAARS tracks players in the scouting process well before they are in the Rams' building, then logs hundreds of data points including medical and sports science information (such as speed during practice movements using GPS trackers, force output in the weight room, etc.) as players continue their careers there. It also tracks players outside of their building for pro personnel purposes, though they have less personal data on those players.
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Because the many data points on prospects can be combined, built into projection models and/or compared with other combinations for other prospects, JAARS helps scouts and analysts debate where they position players on their draft board (Snead keeps players organized into nine buckets).
The language of JAARS is unique to Snead's own preferred communication. Scouting reports used to be thousands of words in length per prospect. In JAARS, players are described in detail using simple colored tabs, shapes and symbols and gradients to illustrate changing opinion over time.
From 'Finding Rams': JAARS tabs, which have movable sliding scales, contain information on anything from character and mental assessments to medical history, athletic testing results and the composite scores built by weighing the different results together. The number of total tabs along a row varies by position — some weigh over a dozen different physical traits.
There is a section where staff can easily access film cut-ups and a section for 'chatter' — leaks, agent-driven reports, videos of workouts shared on social media, quotes from news conferences and more. There is also a section for anonymous surveys … that gather a variety of opinions from scouts after each position evaluation to help the group better understand its consensus or disagreements. Consensus opinions of prospects' top strengths are 'superpowers,' while weaknesses are 'kryptonite.' A section called 'the wisdom of the crowd' references group opinions or collective findings.
Snead 'calls' the draft similarly to how a coach calls a game, including his use of a sheet that looks a lot like one of the giant play cards coaches often hold on the sidelines, though his is digital and displayed on a massive double screen in the draft room. The sheet looks like a series of rectangles that split players by position into four overall tiers and nine different buckets. They are organized in those buckets by their JAARS tab (Snead can immediately recall an evaluation because he instantly sees the tab color and some of the symbols in the tab). There are no round-by-round grades. By mid-April, all draft-eligible players are split into the buckets based on the Rams' finished evaluations, which include the medical and character checks completed in March and, for some, notes from the traveling visits. The buckets aren't always 'rankings' — some are lateral to others.
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From 'Finding Rams': Where McVay groups preferred plays together depending on different scenarios and scribbles notes to himself in the margins, Snead groups positions and players on a massive screen in JAARS, moving between the nine buckets and using the program's simplified language — colors, badges, one-liners such as 'superpower' and 'kryptonite' — to get quick refreshers on that prospect.
While most of the scouting and evaluation process was complete by the time Gladstone, the Rams' previous director of scouting strategy, got the general manager job in Jacksonville, Snead had to fill Gladstone's key role as the conductor of their entire draft operation during the three days. Nicole Blake, who previously worked as a strategist and analyst under Gladstone, will fill that position as the Rams' new director of scouting strategy and analytics. She is 29.
Temme was hired by Gladstone in March. His role has not yet been directly filled, but the Rams will have to find ways to support Garlisch and continue to evolve JAARS as new technology and player data does the same.
Meanwhile, 32-year-old John McKay is the first titled assistant GM under Snead in the Snead/McVay era. McKay and director of pro personnel Matt Waugh, who also serve as remote scouts during the prospect evaluation portion of the year, will continue to lead the college free agency process in the hectic hours after the final round of the draft.
The 23 members of the scouting and analyst department, minus Blake, McKay and Waugh, work remotely. Those people will arrive in L.A. several days before the draft for final arguments, surveys such as the 'Make him a Ram' assessment that famously paired 2024 first- and second-rounders Jared Verse and Braden Fiske together and strategy meetings with coaches.
(Top photo of Sean McVay and Puka Nacua: Dustin Satloff / Getty Images)