David Cutcliffe on Helping Duke's Seniors Prepare for NFL Draft

Players didn't get a pro day, so Cutcliffe had to use his experience and connections

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the traditional preparation for the NFL Draft. This year’s class of draft prospects weren’t able to hold pro days to demonstrate their skills in person for scouts. That’s a problem, especially for players like those in Duke’s senior class, who aren’t expected to go in the early rounds and needed the chance to get their name and reputation out to teams.

“As soon as this happened, that went to my mind back in March,” Duke coach David Cutcliffe said.

Cutcliffe, who coached Peyton and Eli Manning in college and has had a relationship with NFL teams for decades, leading up to Daniel Jones, who went in the first round of the draft last season.

He used his experience and relationships to help his seniors replace their pro day exposure.

“What we did is we built a really attractive manuscript, electronically,” he said. “What I wanted to do is we followed their trail—incoming height, weight, strength, speed, what they had accomplished from a work ethic—just seeing the mere numbers, where they were, all of our records. We keep all of that while we have them.”

In addition to tracking each player’s progress through his time with Duke, Cutcliffe added information about their careers.

“I wrote a bio of each player, a commentary, strengths, the process of who they were,” he said. “You know, the kind of people they are, other pertinent information I felt like general managers and scouts would want, and then we attached clips--football playing clips.”

Some players and their agents across the country have done online pro days.

“I told them if you can, you can put some stuff together that you want to put together and put it out there,” Cutcliffe said, “but I told them what’s going to happen—I’m not being arrogant, but if my name’s attached to this, and it’s going to go to an email to every GM, they’re going to open it. The magic was to keep this (short). I’m not a fool. They’re busy people, and they’re really busy right now. So we were able to keep that between four min or so, in that range, to make it all work and come together.”

The plan seemed to work.

“I got an incredible response from GMs across the board,” he said, “saying, ‘Wow. We haven’t seen anything like this. This is really helpful.’ I think it’s a great way to introduce them. They get basically same information they get on a pro day and maybe get a little bit more individual attention of each one of them. We sent it to area scouts. Its’s been received with a great response. It’s not ideal, but what else could you do? That’s what immediately went to my mind is how horrible this was for those guys. All along they kept saying, ‘The draft’s going happen,’ the whole time, which it will. And you know, let’s pray it works. If nothing else, if you’re not going to be drafted, I think having that in hand may even get you a better shot at signing a free agent contract because of the familiarity. And I put my cell number on every one of those, and I’ve had some calls. I thought it was my responsibility. They’re our guys. We say Duke gang for life, and we mean it. So I felt like it was our responsibility to do everything we could in our power.”