With April almost here, NFL fans anxiously anticipate the draft. Coaches and scouts from every team are traveling across the country to observe players participate in drills on their respective pro days. The information that the coaches and scouts will gather will allow each team to make more concrete decisions about the direction they will head in April.

For anyone who is not familiar with it, the NFL draft is a process that all teams go through in April.

Players from the collegiate level that graduate or who leave early to pursue their professional career will go through a series of drills in two meetings.

The first is the Scouting Combine, a February meeting in Indianapolis where all prospects show off their physical skills and the second is the pro day for their school that is usually scheduled sometime in March.

Then in April, a player waits to be selected by an NFL team during the draft.

The draft order corresponds with each team’s record from the previous year, meaning the team with the worst record holds the first pick while the Super Bowl champion holds the final pick in the round.

This year, the draft has been extended through three days to make all seven rounds more convenient for fans to watch.

While we all wish players could be selected early and get a contract worth significant amounts of money, we need to step back and look at this from the teams’ point-of-view.

History teaches teams a very important lesson about the draft and each coach and general manager will heed its lesson.

Unfortunately, some will still fall victim to this lesson because they failed to succeed in the draft.

History teaches that if you do not draft well, you do not perform well in the regular season in addition to setting the franchise back a few years. This means that drafting the wrong guy in the first or second round will negatively impact a team by not filling a need that a team has.

This problem does not seem too devastating at first, but do not underestimate it. A hypothetical situation can illustrate the wreck that a mistake in the draft can cause.

Let’s say that a team is in need of a cornerback, but the defensive line and linebackers have talented veterans that are Pro-Bowl caliber players.

This team selects a cornerback in the first round, but little does this team realize that the player drafted does not have the work ethic needed to be a professional player. He may have the physical tools but he wouldn’t be able to fill the role he’s been chosen for.

Making this situation worse is that the team does not realize that he will never become the player that many thought he would be until three years after selecting him.

By this time, the majority of the players on the defensive line and line-backing corps have received better offers in free agency and left the team while others have retired. Now this team not only has to replace a corner, but almost an entire defense as well.

This has happened before and it generally results in a head coach getting fired and sometimes the general manager too. The new coach brought in is expected to replace and coach an entire offense or defense all because one selection did not go the way everyone thought it would.

So much scouting happens in February, March and April, but teams do it to prevent a mistake from being made in the draft.

Teams will make crucial decisions regarding the prospects they want to add to their team during the draft.

A right decision will help a team take a step in the right direction, while a wrong decision will send a team scrambling to find new players and coaches to reconcile the franchise.

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