Some head coaches could use the coronavirus as an excuse as to why they fell short in the 2020 NFL Draft, but Ron Rivera of the Washington Redskins won't be one of them. Ahead of the draft, Rivera highlighted how the past NFL lockout taught him how to prep for a potential coronavirus delay.
“The biggest thing I learned was ‘Be ready,’” Rivera said, via Mike Jones of USA Today. “We were ready in every phase. We kept saying, ‘If we come back here, this is how much time we’ll have left to go.’ I kept adjusting the schedule weekly as we’d get into it.”
Back in 2011, the NFL had a lockout that lasted five months of the year. Luckily for the league, they avoided missing any regular-season games.
Even though they didn't miss any games, Rivera, the new Redskins head coach, learned how to deal with a possible postponement. At the same time, Rivera realizes that the basics become even more important in these situations.
“This is one of those things that’s really going to test you, and test to find out how good your basics are,” Rivera said. “How good you are in your college scouting department, how good you are as evaluators as coaches and figuring out how this young man is going to fit into your system, just how good you were when you interviewed him. What kind of a feel did you get? This is going to test us, and it’s kind of interesting that we’re going back to the basics of fundamentals of scouting and coaching.”
Rather than the traditional setting in this year's draft, teams are forced to conduct their drafts from their own homes. While it is a nuisance for some teams, it also shows which franchises have a good infrastructure in place.
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