SAN DIEGO – Headlines generated from Mobile’s Ladd-Peebles Stadium at this week’s Senior Bowl revolve around who improved their stock and who hurt it.
While General Manager A.J. Smith and the Chargers take notes and make evaluations, they don’t burn the stacks of information they compiled during the fall based on one or two practices.
Smith and the scouting department has narrowed its focus somewhat at this point in terms of the number of players they are considering, but they consider the Senior Bowl just another line on the job application that will be evaluated in full between now and April 28, the first day of the draft.
The Chargers don’t stage daily mock drafts and rearrange the rankings every few hours based on each 7-on-7, but focus on gathering more information.
“You don’t knock a guy for a bad performance,” Smith said. “You might think about, ‘Gee, he didn’t have a very good week,’ but you’ve got to be very, very careful with raising or dropping somebody in that setting.
“All it really is, we’re all sitting there and we’re looking at these guys. It’s another piece to the puzzle so to speak. If a player had a Senior Bowl then we add that to the résumé.”
The Senior Bowl presented the three recently-hired assistant coaches one of their first opportunities to contribute to the team’s direction. But they’re on equal ground when it comes to knowing the personnel department’s volume of research on this year’s class.
Focused on the NFL during the season, Mobile is the first time the coaches know exactly who Smith and the scouts like and who they’re considering.
Rather than attend practice attempting to compose a full report on the more than 100 players in Mobile, Smith selected a narrower group.
“I’ll have anywhere from 15 to 20 players that I will zero in during the course of my time there and really focus on that,” Smith said. “It’s kind of the way I’ve handled it before rather than have a roster full of both teams. The number is too great.
“You’re going around and not really accomplishing all that much. I’ll narrow it down to some players that are of great interest to me and I’ll zoom in on that.
“Most of the top players in the country are in that particular game, so it’s very intriguing. We go down there and we pretty much know who they are before we get there, but it gives you a chance to see them up front, up close, and going against some other people. So we think it’s very, very beneficial.”
