The Los Angeles Rams take an unconventional approach to the NFL draft. Les Snead and Sean McVay haven’t attended the combine in Indianapolis since 2020, nor have they been spotted at many pro days over the years.
And when it comes to prospect meetings, the Rams don’t bring players to their facility for official top-30 visits like the majority of other teams do. It’s not because they don’t value the draft. They just have their own way of evaluating players from afar.
With so much talk about the Rams and their hidden interest in Ty Simpson this year, Les Snead felt compelled to clear things up. He was on the “Pat McAfee Show” on Tuesday and explained exactly what goes into combine meetings, top-30 visits and more.
“Here’s probably where it all starts and we’ll get into the boring weeds of the NFL,” he began. “There’s top-30s. Let’s start with the combine. At the combine, you can interview 45 people, let’s call it officially, 18 to 20 minutes. There’s some other – I forget what they’re called now, where you can interview people in other settings.”
Then he started talking about top-30 visits, which the Rams haven’t done with a player since Kobie Turner visited in 2023.
“What are top-30s?” he said. “You can bring your players to your facility. Bring them to your city. What happens there is there is a lot of logistics that go with top-30s. A lot of times, players are doing multiple. You’re working with other teams to sometimes get a player from their facility to yours at a certain time. At the end of the day, these things become more public. And, also, you can get into some of the things when you’re flying back and forth as a player from all these cities and time zones, and then there’s a draft, and then a couple weeks later, there’s OTAs, you can get into some soft-tissue issues.”
So, why don’t the Rams bring prospects in for top-30 visits? Not only are there a lot of logistical hoops to jump through with scheduling, but they also try to hide their interest in specific players – like Simpson, for example.
“Historically, we do not do top-30s here at the Rams,” he said. “The main reason is this. A lot of times, when those meetings become public, a team behind you, let’s say they’re interested in that player somewhere along that way in the draft, you never know who’s lurking from behind. Let’s say you’re picking 55, 65, and all of a sudden, someone moves to 64 because they think you might pick that player, at that point, there’s nothing you can do. You can just sit, wait, see what they do, and if they pick the player you want. So there’s a little strategy there.”
“Our last top-30: 2023, Kobie Turner. The reason we did Kobie is he wasn’t invited to Indy. Indy’s where a lot of the medicals and physicals occur. A lot of times, if you’re planning on drafting a player, you’d like to bring him to your city, let him go through a physical with your medical team. So 2023 is our last top-30.”
Instead of bringing prospects to their facility in Woodland Hills, the Rams prefer to go meet players on campus. Snead says they usually don’t work out players in those settings, having seen plenty of practice and game film, but they do like to talk football with them, whether it’s about scheme, fit or their past experience.
This year, Snead says the Rams did 66 private visits after doing 61 last year. So their scouts and other talent evaluators met with a lot of players before the draft. It just wasn’t always Snead and McVay taking those visits.
“What we like to do is go meet the player on their campus,” Snead said. “In this draft cycle, we did 66 private meetings with players. In 2025 draft cycle, we did 61 private meetings with players. That’s not Sean and I all the time. We’re not going to go see 66 (players). So it’s different people in our building going to connect with these players. We usually don’t work them out. They played football, we’ve seen them practice, we’ve seen them play games. … We usually like to meet the kid. Also, do this: You know how important it is with installations, whether you play offense or defense, install some of our scheme, allow those players to spit it back to us, see how they’re processing football, see how they’re relating what they’ve done in the past to ours, how fast it might take them to get up to speed and help the Rams. And we’ll also talk ball with them about what they may do.”
For anyone wondering how the Rams handle the pre-draft process and prospect meetings, Snead’s breakdown is great. It perfectly explains why the Rams are one of the only teams that never have reported top-30 visits and reveals how many prospects they do meet with leading up to the draft.
It’s not that they don’t put in the work. They certainly do. It’s just that they handle all of the pre-draft madness in a different way.
This article originally appeared on Rams Wire: Les Snead gives awesome insight into Rams’ draft process and prospect meetings
Reporting by Cameron DaSilva, Rams Wire / Rams Wire
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
