At some point after the Senior Bowl and before the Scouting Combine, Washington decided to get rid of G.M. Scot McCloughan. The team didn’t get rid of his work.
“Well, he certainly had influence on it because we all met as we always did the last couple of years and every team does,” Washington director of college scouting Scott Campbell told reporters on Monday. “You meet right after the all-star games before you go to the Combine and kind of get an initial ranking of how you like the guys. Of course, Scot hadn’t been here since, so just like when he was here before, there’s adjustments being made to the board with the new information. We did that with Scot also, so it’s not just like we use that information then we’re done and we’re just sitting around waiting for the draft. There’s still information being done, information added and guys are being moved up and down with the information. Certainly his influence is there from the initial boards.”
The final board won’t be determined with the benefit of McCloughan’s input. But plenty of other people will have their fingerprints on the final configuration of rankings.
“Bruce [Allen] will be involved, definitely, and Jay [Gruden], of course,” Campbell said. “Everyone will be involved in the final Redskin grade at the end of the day. And the goal is to not have panic on draft day. You want to have all that stuff. . . . You don’t want to have a brand new argument break out right there before you’re picking. That’s ridiculous. I’ve never seen that happen in any team I’ve been with. It’s all been worked out, hashed out. The argument’s already been had, because really by then it’s too late.”
It’s definitely too late to erase McCloughan’s influence on the draft class, or to keep him from sharing that influence with other teams, if he so chooses. The smarter move would have been to find a way to keep McCloughan around through the draft, but there isn’t much about how the team handled McCloughan’s situation that objectively could be referred to as “smart.”