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For this weekend, the team converts a meeting room into a well-wired headquarters for evaluating and selecting college talent.
By ERNEST HOOPER
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 20, 2001
TAMPA -- It's Wednesday, the draft is three days away, but the Bucs war room is already equipped for D-day.
Players hardly recognize the team's offensive meeting room.
Five draft boards hang on the walls.
To the right is the best-to-worst board, ranking every player regardless of position. On the left is the draft-order board, which tracks the picks numerically, and the team-by-team draft board.
The far wall has the board that rates players position by position. The wall closest to the door lists players the Bucs may pick up as undrafted free agents.
In the corner is a mini-Blockbuster: a bookcase of highlight films of virtually every player the Bucs are considering.
Fifteen people fill the room, but there only are eight chairs around the main table. The makeup includes who you would expect: general manager Rich McKay, coach Tony Dungy, director of player personnel Jerry Angelo, director of college scouting Tim Ruskell, director of football administration John Idzik and the Glazer brothers (Joel, Bryan and Ed).
There are also five area scouts, two administrative assistants. Assistant coaches are in their offices, readily available.
Nine telephones are scattered through the room, along with three televisions and seven computer ports. One of the telephones links the room directly to the Bucs table in New York and is open all day. Video director Dave Levy, who already is in New York for league committee meeting, and personnel assistant Seth Turner handle the actual selection process.
Of course, the equipment and personnel aren't the only things in place well before the draft starts. By today, the team has examined every scenario and has a complex plan to deal with virtually any situation.
"The major decisions have been made," Angelo said. "The players have been lined up in accordance to their levels. Tim (Ruskell) does a great job of setting the board best to worst, irrelevant of the position. Then we talk over the different scenarios: who would we trade up for; who would we trade down for; what would it take to trade down. All those what I call, "What ifs.'
"Draft day is a day of acting not reacting. You want to put in all those situations that can come about. You don't want to have to have a caucus when you're on the clock. That's not good business."
One of the surprises of the Bucs' draft-day setup is the inclusion of scouts. Some teams don't allow their scouts to have much input during the draft, according to Angelo. He said a few teams even have their scouts off the property.
"The scouts are the unsung heroes, and we try to keep the scouts in the process and we probably do as good of job of that as any," Angelo said. "We get their opinions on the players that they like, that we like. We want to know everything that they think, what they think of different scenarios."
It's only fair to include the scouts when you consider they have been working on the process since May. Right after the 2000 draft, they began reviewing tape of the seniors and juniors who would make up the next draft.
Starting in August, the scouting staff ventures out to see the players, and continues through the post-season all-star games. McKay, Ruskell and Angelo cross-check the scouting reports for the players they consider to be in the top 200.
"We all gather information in a very similar fashion, but our decisionmaking and the way we go about our decisions is vastly different," McKay said.
For years, the Bucs were coach-driven. After the scouts gathered information, assistants would rate the players and the coach normally would have the final say. That changed when McKay become general manager before the 1995 draft. Now the personnel staff ranks players and categorizes them on different tiers.
The assistants are used to rank the players on each tier. If four receivers are classified as Level A, receivers coach Charlie Williams will help put those four in order.
"But we're not going to take a player on Level C and put him on Level A," Angelo said. "If you put a coach in the room and give him 15 players and say rate them, he might have a Level C up at A. That could be a potential problem."
One thing Angelo loves to boast about is how well the staff gets along. The personnel department has a good understanding of what Dungy and the assistants like in players, and the assistants have bought into the Bucs' assessment process.
Of course, there are disagreements. McKay does well at handling different opinions and building a consensus. If the brain trust can't agree, McKay has a simple way of settling disputes.
"If we're at an impasse and the impasse is such that we cannot resolve it, then that player is going to come off the board," McKay says. "I'm not going to be a GM that tries to impose my will on the personnel side or on the coaching staff."
The Bucs have tweaked their draft-day preparations, but it's largely the same since McKay took over. And it should stay. Last season, 14 of the Bucs' 24 starters came from the past six drafts and 24 of the team's 48 picks since 1995 were on the active roster.