For nearly all of us, one year ago at about this time we were all scrambling to learn to use virtual platforms like Zoom to communicate with our teams and staff to deal with the COVID pandemic.
Here we are 16 months or so later, and NFL teams are having to prepare virtually for an NFL Draft being held next week. A big part of that process is meeting with potential draft prospects, and that is having to be done virtually for the second year in a row now.
Not being able to meet in person means that there is no opportunity for a moment like Pete Carroll ripping off his shirt for his draft interview with DK Metcalf a few years ago.
However, like so many coaches over the past year, Nick Sirianni and his staff have gotten creative in their virtual interviews with prospects to try and get a feel for how competitive a guy is.
How creative? Well that depends on the coach.
After Eagles GM Howie Roseman mentioned the creativity of the staff in they ways that they went about assessing a prospect's competitiveness, first-year Eagles head coach Sirianni shared during their presser today that he's utilized Paper-Rock-Scissors coupled with some friendly trash talking.
"If you guys are wondering, I'll tell ya. I think some of you guys are wondering what kind of games, we didn't go earth shattering with these games, but I played a couple of them at Rock-Paper-Scissors. It was as easy as that."
"Rock-Paper-Scissors, lets see how competitive you are. I'm competitive and I'm going to be talking trash with them. Did you talk trash back to me?"
"There's Jeopardy, and there is different ways of doing it and it looks a lot of different ways, but our coaches go so creative with it. Guys like Jeff Stoutland, Brian Johnson, Aaron Moorehead, they did such a great job of figuring out ways to compete because everyone's compete looks a little bit different. I played some Rock-Paper-Scissors, and they might have gotten a little more creative than I did at times."
Hear more from Sirianni, Roseman and the Eagles front office in the clip below.