First-year Eagles coach Nick Sirianni revealed he uses a little trash talk and Rochambeau to judge NFL draft prospects. Out came the Twitter trolls, clubs in hand.
They should head back to their caves on this issue. Rock-paper-scissors games aren't just pre-draft folly; they're the perfect way to measure strategy and determination.
"Let's see how competitive you are," Sirianni explained in a press conference. "I'm competitive. I'm going to be talking trash to them. Did you talk trash back to me?"
Simply put: The prospects that handle his rock-paper-scissors pressure are the kind of players Sirianni wants to build around.
He'll have plenty of opportunities to find future cornerstones. The Eagles have the most total picks (11) of any team in the 2021 NFL Draft, including No. 12 overall. Haters want to laugh; Sirianni has a strategy.
Given our national situation, that strategy is key. COVID-19 has turned face-to-face time into FaceTimes for draft hopefuls. Scouts haven't been as able to watch practice and see a player practice and compete in person.
Sirianni's rock-paper-scissors test is actually a neat little workaround designed to fill in the scouting blanks. After all, teams ask NFL draft prospects to undergo every imaginable evaluation before they jump to the pros.
What's wrong with gauging a player's rock-paper-scissors strategy?
"There's different ways to do it, it looks a lot of different ways, but our coaches got so creative with this," Sirianni said. "They all did a great job of just figuring out how to compete, because everyone… looks a little different."
