[CanuckRightWinger]

Just looking over tomorrow night's Los Ramos roster and started counting up the number of UDFA's that Les Snead and his scouts have uncovered, or that he has found on the NFL waiver wire.....or otherwise purloined a la Troy Hill offa Bill Bellicheck's PS in December 2015.
In order of experience they are:

Kendall Blanton TD Mizzou
Chandler Brewer OG/OT Middle Tennessee State
Jake Gervaise S Iowa
Natrez Patrick OLB/ILB Georgia
Troy Reeder ILB Delaware
Nsimba Webster WR E.Washington
Coleman Shelton OC Washington
Johnny Mundt TE Oregon
Darious Williams CB Alabama-Birmingham
Dont'e Deayon CB Boise State
Morgan Fox DE Colorado State-Pueblo
Austin Blythe OG/OC Iowa
Malcolm Brown RB Texas
Troy Hill CB Oregon
Cory Littleton ILB Washington
Nickell Robey-Coleman CB USC
Johnny Hekker P Oregon State
Jake McQuade LS Ohio State
TOTAL: 18 UNDRAFTED GUYS ON OUR 53 MAN ROSTER

Two Questions:
Did I miss anybody?
Am I correct in assuming Los Ramos would be near the top of the NFL with 18 UDFAs on their 53 man roster?

[aeneas1]

i think every team has a bunch, for example according pro football reference the niners have (at least) 18.. just enter the team name in the dropdown box (currently shows niners) and hit get results:

https://www.pro-football-reference.com/ ... finder.cgi

[/zn/]

The 99 Rams had 21 UDFAs on the roster. (I mean originally UDFAs in their draft year, no matter who took them--not all 21 were signed first by the Rams. )

A remarkable 9 of them were starters (counting K, P, and KR).

The 6 UDFAs who were starters on offense and defense (so excluding special teams) were Jenkins, Fletcher, Jones, Farr, Gruttadauria, and Warner.

Eventual starters on that roster include Hodgins and McCollum.

[Rams1PlateSince1976]

And why does every team have a bunch of UDFA's? Because analytics, a timer, a scale, a tape measure, high-school and college stats can't measure the Heart. ((and physical maturity)). I think college recruiters are more hung-up on the "measurables" than Pro scouts.

[BobCarl]

counting up the number of UDFA's that Les Snead and his scouts have uncovered

when legit draft picks are traded away (not always a bad thing), and when franchise $$ are being paid to a QB, the best DL in the NFL, and soon to be highest paid CB in the NFL (not always a bad thing) ... this strategy leaves a lot of voids to fill by UDFAs .

The glory to this strategy comes when a player, like Johnny Hekker, performs on a level as well as a First-Round-pick/Hall-Of-Fame player did at the same position.

[safer]

Know what? It was Kurt Warner's incredible success that dramatically changed how teams look at undrafted guys. Teams used to be arrogant about what they thought they knew. It wasn't too long ago that they didn't even bring in undrafted guys..............now all teams have a bunch of those guys all ready to go after, when the draft is done. It seems to be really smart of a team to offer a guy, like a $50k signing bonus (which is huge to a UDFA), if you like him a lot. That's chump change in the big scheme of things.
It's still hard to fathom how a guy like Cory Littleton wasn't drafted at all. Go figure.
When the Rams won the SB in 2000, they had three elite players that were undrafted.
Kurt, Adam Timmerman, and London Fletcher.
To your point Canuck, I would think we are at the top of that scale..........hard to figure if we were lucky "second guessers", or smarter than most. Pretty much a crap shoot by that point.

[/zn/]

When the Rams won the SB in 2000, they had three elite players that were undrafted.
Kurt, Adam Timmerman, and London Fletcher.
To your point Canuck, I would think we are at the top of that scale..........hard to figure if we were lucky "second guessers", or smarter than most. Pretty much a crap shoot by that point.

BTW Timmerman was originally a 7th rounder.

Teams can make genuine committments to pursuing UDFAs. It depends on how much time and money they are willing to spend. The JZ Rams (when he was the GM) downplayed UDFAs. Starting in 2012 the Kroenke Rams pursued them seriously.

The Vermeil approach to team-building stressed that you took every approach to acquiring players equally seriously. Drafts, trades, free agency, UDFAs, picking up young "cast-offs" (like Nutten) who had not caught on with a team yet (technically Warner came in that way though he was originally a UDFA with Green Bay).

[/zn/]

I think this part is actually incomplete, when it comes to the pros.

With some guys, it’s measurables, with others it’s no tape, with others, it’s things like position questions.

Go look at a guy like Reeder and his measurements. He’s an incredible athlete. But played lower competition.

Littleton moves positions a bunch AND didn’t have incredible measurables.

It’s all over the place, why guys don’t get drafted. Scouts and organizations care about how much guys love football, but it’s a big puzzle.

Snead once said that 18% of the starters in the league were UDFAs. I don't remember what year he said that and I don't know if that exact number still holds.

Another reason you need UDFAs is that you just can't do it with draft picks alone. If you used only the draft, in the unlikely event your team hit on every draft pick, to build a team with 22 starters, 5 or 6 key back-ups and role players (like nickel CB), plus at least 3 good special teamers (let's say K, P, returner) would take 5 years.

[Elvis]

I'm sure some things as simple as the draft going from 20 rounds in 1960 and working its way down to 7 today has a lot to do with it...

[CanuckRightWinger]

Dammit!

So there I was, on the eve of our DoOrDie Game, trying to compose a "feel-good" and "rah-rah" post, about Les Snead's (& his scouts') brilliant work on assembling 18 UDFAs on the Rams Roster.....

….and my whole premise is gets TOTALLY DEBASED....
... by aeneas1 and Elvis...
via their injection of FACTS and LOGIC!!!!

Man Alive.....I now feel lower than a snake's belly in a tire-rut!!

In my best Captain James T. Kirk:
MUST
FIND A
RAMS FORUM
WITH FEWER
SMART GUYS!

Seriously, per that helpful site that aeneas1 provided above, the 2019 League-wide UDFA range seems to go from a high of 27 in Miami, to a low of 14 in New England (& Seattle ).....with our 2 other NFC West rivals the 49ers and Cardinals all in about the middling NFL high teens of UDFAs just like Los Ramos 18 UDFAs.

GO RAMS!! FLEECE THE HAWKS!!!