Colts might have to do 2020 draft virtually
By Ryan Stano
According to ESPN’s Adam Schefter, NFL teams are preparing to do the 2020 draft virtually and not at the team facilities.
We live in a weird time right now. Most states around the country have stay-at-home orders issued and the sports world is almost completely shut down. There are certainly no live sporting events, but the NFL world keeps churning out all kinds of news.
The latest of that news is that the draft will still be held in late April, but teams are now preparing to do that draft completely online. According to ESPN’s Adam Schefter, teams around the league believe that’s where things are headed at this point.
The Colts will have to adjust if this is in fact how the draft is going to transpire. It already hurt their process that they weren’t going to be able to have any pre-draft interviews. Chris Ballard has said multiple times how valuable those interviews are to selecting prospects for his team.
Ballard will have to hope that the interviews he went through during the Combine are enough for him to trust what the player is really like. The interviews might be viewed as the most important pre-draft process for the management of the Colts.
As far as the functionality of the draft itself, I wouldn’t anticipate this being too big of an issue for the Colts. The biggest problem is that everyone won’t be in the same room together to make decisions. That will likely have to happen over the phone or video chat.
All in all, it shouldn’t have a massive effect on who the Colts decide to draft. It will be an interesting event that hopefully never has to be done this way ever again.