2012 NFL Draft: Ignore Team Visits and Private Workouts at Your Own Risk

We see it come across the wire multiple times a day at this time of year. A team is bringing a draft prospect in for a "visit". Today, we learned that the Browns are bringing QB Ryan Tannehill in for a visit. The teams get 30 such visits for players that don't have a connection to their locale, and while not every visit is an indication of strong draft interest, we can still learn a lot from paying attention to them.

Pro Football Talk's Evan Silva did a terrific breakdown of the predictive value and patterns of visits last year. The results can be found here, but I also wanted to comment on a few of his conclusions:

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In 2011, 12 of the top 14 picks either worked out for or visited their team before the draft.

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Silva points out that the two exceptions were the Jaguars and QB Blaine Gabbert (although the GM Gene Smith was at Gabbert's bowl game), and the Texans and DE JJ Watt (although the Texans don't use their visits for highly-rated prospects). So, you have evidence of how meaningful visits are for the top of the draft.

Silva connects his observation on the Texans to another conclusion:

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Some teams don’t use any pre-draft visits on elite prospects.

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He rattles off the Texans, Bears, Jaguars and Packers, and then adds the Colts and Raiders as that fall into this category "for the most part". So, by paying attention to the usage of team visits, we can know that a lack of a visit by a highly-rated prospect doesn't necessarily decrease the chance that they will be the first-round pick for a team.

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21 of 2011's 32 first-round picks visited or privately worked out for the team that drafted them.

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The caveat here is that the Seahawks specifically did not want to create a connection to Alabama OT James Carpenter (a surprise first-rounder), so sometimes the lack of a visit or workout will be meaningful. Still, the data proves that most teams will leave us clues to their intention in the first round with their use of pre-draft visits and workouts.

Greg Gabriel, a long-time scout and personnel man in the NFL, shared his thoughts on pre-draft visits in the National Football Post piece titled "What does it mean when you bring in a prospect for a visit?".

Gabriel does warn about the "smokescreen":

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Often the question is asked if the players a club brings in for a visit are players that the club is definitely interested in drafting. In some cases yes, but it also can serve as a smokescreen. In other words, bring in and publicize that you are bringing in certain players only to make other clubs think that you may be interested.

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Gabriel also echoes Silva's findings on some teams using visits mostly on late-round or free-agent prospects:

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Another thing to remember is many of the players that clubs bring in are players that they have an interest in but were not at the Combine. Every year, there are about 40 players who weren’t at the combine who get drafted and some of those players will get drafted as high as the second round. You need to get a medical on these players before you draft them. Another large group of players brought in are players that you may have no interest in drafting but are very interested in signing as an undrafted free agent after the draft. By getting the medical done you know if the player is healthy and all right to sign.

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The last point Gabriel makes in the piece might be the best for those of us that like to do detective work at this of year. Gabriel says teams sometimes prefer to visit the player at his home or school because those visits are often kept "quiet". In other words, if a team doesn't want us to know what they are up to at this time of year, perhaps that means even more than the visits that are publicized, which we already know mean a lot, thanks to Silva's work.