James Gladstone Explains Why Jaguars Don’t Host Top-30 Visits

With all the talk these days about relationships with players, whether teams really like prospects or truly love them, James Gladstone wants to trust his head more than his heart.

The Jaguars’ 34-year-old general manager said Tuesday that’s one reason why Jacksonville is the NFL’s only team that doesn’t bring prospects to club headquarters prior to the draft. The NFL gives each team the opportunity to schedule up to 30 in-person visits with draft-eligible prospects between the combine and draft, in addition to hour-long virtual interviews. But they’ve gone dark in Duval County.

“I think there's a lot of layers to not doing those facility visits that you all are accustomed to, top-30 visits, as they're phrased,” Gladstone told reporters at his pre-draft press conference Tuesday. “It goes back a while in my experience. Let's take it this direction: The implicit bias that can come to life this late in the process, the last player you might sit down with, and how that might differ from the first player you sit down with, knowing it's closer to the decision that's upcoming.

“In addition to that, so much of the work that's done in preparation for these decisions starts years in advance. The sourced intel from those who have lived with these individuals is likely to be more accurate than me sitting down with a prospect for a short period of time and attempting to dissect who that human being is. So, I don't view myself as having this extreme super power of deciphering the complexity of a person in an hour, right?”

No one knows whether circumstances will allow specific teams to draft players who visit their facilities. In fact, most of the time, teams draft players that haven’t visited. However, most general managers believe the time presents great opportunities for both parties – team and prospect -- to gather information that could be valuable, for example, four years down the road when the players become unrestricted free agents.

But Gladstone knows that. When an NFL team invests in a draft choice, especially one drafted fifth overall in the first round, a swing and miss can reverberate for years. And Gladstone didn’t become an NFL general manager by doing what everyone else does.

After all, if Curly Lambeau didn’t script his Notre Dame forward pass into those early Packers’ offenses, drawing heavy criticism from those who thought it was disrespectful, Trevor Lawrence might be the league’s highest-paid fullback and kicker. Rest assured, Gladstone has thick skin, and plenty of other tools in his belt.

“There are other mechanisms that we tend to lean into to help us determine whether or not a player is, in fact, a fit for us, more than just a singular touchpoint that would be a top-30 visit. We have a lot of additional mechanisms that we deploy that don't necessarily put us at risk for the rest of the world to know what direction we're heading.

“So, often those become public-facing touchpoints, at which point you're sacrificing some version of strategy come draft day, as well.”

Does that mean the Jaguars won’t take Mason Graham, as the vast majority of mock drafts have predicted? We’ll all find out together on April 24, not a minute before.

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