NFL Draft
1/29/25
6 min read
Pre-Draft Prep Ramps Up With Senior Bowl and East-West Shrine Game
The 2024 NFL season doesn’t end until Super Bowl LIX on February 9 but the 2025 Draft prep ramps up significantly this week with the Senior Bowl and East-West Shrine Bowl.
The pre-draft work by NFL teams actually is a year-round exercise. Scouts study video of college players every working day. NFL GMs, player personnel execs and scouts hit the road in the fall to visit college campuses and take in games.
The Hula Bowl and College Gridiron Showcase took place a couple weeks ago as lesser all-star games not attracting the top players and the HBCU Legacy Bowl takes place on February 22. But the Senior Bowl and East-West Shrine Bowl feature many of the top college players heading into the NFL.
It’s unfortunate that even the Senior Bowl as the premier pre-draft event can’t get several likely top 10 players to play, such as quarterbacks Cam Ward and Shedeur Sanders, WR/DB Travis Hunter and Edge Abdul Carter who are comfortable with their status and don’t want to risk injury.
Unlike the Senior Bowl, the East-West Shrine Bowl allows top players to come in for team interviews and not participate in practice or the game. That’s what a few players such as Sanders did this week.
There still are plenty of talented players in Mobile this week for the Senior Bowl and in Dallas for the East-West Shrine Bowl. Included at the Senior Bowl are fine college QBs Jalen Milroe (Alabama), Jaxson Dart (Ole Miss), Dillon Gabriel (Oregon) and Tyler Shough (Louisville) and highly rated defensive linemen/edge players Shemar Stewart (Texas A&M), Mike Green (Marshall) and Walter Nolen (Ole Miss). They all have the opportunity to make a big impact this week and raise their stock.
They’ll be viewed up close by an abundance of NFL GMs, College Player Personnel Directors, coaches and scouts in attendance with many of them hitting both locales in a huge travel expenditure for the teams that is considered standard operating procedure with future talent acquisition on the line.
The GMs decide who in the player personnel area goes to each site with the practice sessions being the priority as the team personnel can get an up-close look at the players in drills.
Head coaches set their schedules and designate where their assistant coaches go, which is usually only to the Senior Bowl except in the case of the coordinators who may hit the practices at both of these all-star games.
The two events are well coordinated so team personnel are able to watch two days of East-West practices early this week before heading to the Senior Bowl for three days of practices. Most of the GMs and many of the head coaches will hit both events with the Senior Bowl being the priority. Kevin Stefanski of the Cleveland Browns (who hold the No. 2 overall pick) is among the head coaches hitting both venues.
Other than a couple of scouts per team who stay for the games, all other team personnel will leave before the Thursday night East-West Shrine Bowl and Saturday afternoon Senior Bowl. They will have an opportunity to review the game tape afterwards.
The stock of many players will rise and fall with their performances this week. During my GM years, I emphasized the extra importance for us to see how non-Power 5 conference players who did not regularly face top caliber competition during the season match up with Power 5 players in drills and game action.
I always told our player personnel people and scouts that the most important piece of the player evaluation puzzle was their play in actual games during the just completed season and in previous seasons (especially in the case of players who were injured in the 2024 season). And in the case of the Senior Bowl and East-West, there is game competition which is valuable for the teams to watch and evaluate.
I reinforced that critical point about “how do they play in games?” when we went to the NFL Combine in late February in Indianapolis where the physicals and interviews take on more importance. The same line of thinking held true for Pro Days in March and pre-draft team visits by players in April.
Yes, it’s an important part of the information-gathering process to get an accurate 40-time and count the bench-press reps. But I would cite examples such as Hall of Fame receivers Jerry Rice and Cris Carter who ran in the 4.5 range in the 40, not the record-setting 4.21 that the Chiefs’ Xavier Worthy blazed at last year’s Combine. But Rice and Carter were great route-runners with exceptional hands and contested-catch ability.
So the measurables are necessary to determine but don’t tell the whole story of a player’s future prospects.
The Senior Bowl helps the important player interview process by sending pre-recorded video of all players to the teams before their staff members hit Mobile to talk with players in person. That’s also helpful to Chiefs Coach Andy Reid, Eagles Coach Nick Sirianni and their assistant coaches who are busy game-planning for Super Sunday so they can’t go to Dallas or Mobile but they will interview players at the Combine and perhaps on April visits to their offices.
They will be sure to watch tapes of Senior Bowl and East-West Shrine Bowl practices and the games either before or shortly after they head to the Combine less than three weeks after the Super Bowl. But Reid and Sirianni know GMs Brett Veach of the Chiefs and Howie Roseman of the Eagles, along with their player personnel execs and scouts, are in Mobile and Dallas this week.
The NFL Draft has grown into a huge event that will take place before an estimated 250,000 people at historic Lambeau Field on April 24-26 (along with millions watching on TV). The countdown is beginning in earnest this week at the Senior Bowl and East-West Shrine Bowl.
