Christian Smith wanted to create solutions. That’s actually why he got into information technology. He had loved it since high school and thought it would be cool to find resolutions to problems that arose and presented themselves to his employer.
But if anyone had asked him five years ago, when he first started working for Washington, if he could imagine being a part of a team trying to find a solution for putting on a virtual draft during a pandemic, well, he would’ve told you he didn’t see that coming. And especially not two and a half weeks before the first round of the 2020 NFL Draft was kicking off on April 23.
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“No, I never would’ve thought this would happen,” Smith, a network administrator, said with a laugh. “But, it was cool, you know? We got to exercise our IT chops a little bit and figure out solutions for this problem we had. … That’s why I got into IT, for the problem-solving.”
As reports increased about the spread of COVID-19 and the adverse effects of the virus, so too did the amount of sports leagues shutting down in response. Washington was one of the first teams to respond when owner Dan Snyder recalled his scouts and team personnel from their travels in March and told them to return to their respective homes.
After NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and the league announced on March 16 that all public events surrounding this year’s draft were going to be nixed, it was only a matter of time before the entire cancellation of a physical draft followed. When Goodell sent a memo to all 32 teams that the upcoming draft was going virtual, every team’s IT department went on the clock to prepare their organizations.
So in early April, Washington tasked Asheesh Kinra and his team with mapping out a game plan, determining what tools they and the football folks would need, how long it would take to set up and then to run multiple tests to make sure it worked properly. Kinra, the team’s vice president of information technology, said the first step was establishing how many people they needed to worry about, who they were, and then try to make the experience as normal for them as possible.
“I think the biggest concern was making coach (Ron Rivera) and (vice president of player personnel) Kyle (Smith) and everyone feel comfortable,” Kinra said. “Making them not have to worry about anything else except putting in their picks and communicating the way they would in a normal draft. That was my concern, and obviously, being prepared for the different scenarios that could play out. For me, the biggest thing would be the computers and internet dying in multiple locations at the same time, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen.”
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Kinra was able to feel certain because of the system that he and his team set up to put Washington’s virtual draft together. He and Christian Smith spent a week working with Rivera, Kyle Smith, Tim Breads (senior systems admin of information technology), Jeff Scott (director of football strategy/scout), Rob Rogers (senior vice president of football administration), Paul Kelly (director of football operations) and the team’s IT department to comb over how to bring the war room to life in both the coach’s and Kyle Smith’s homes. After teams were initially left to their own devices to navigate their virtual drafts, the NFL’s IT department reached out as the draft approached to offer assistance, suggestions and contacts at Verizon for additional backing.
Eight business days before the draft began, Kinra and Christian Smith loaded up their cars with the tools they’d need to set up everything and had movers transport the 80-inch TVs to Rivera’s and Kyle Smith’s homes. The main thing the pair was trying to accomplish during their set up was redundancy. For every piece of technology in each house, there had to be a backup. There were two Cisco phones, just like there would be in their offices, two Microsoft book laptops and two Verizon MiFi cards to ensure they had backup internet in case the primary internet crashed.
Breads configured the phones and got the systems up to speed. The IT team checked everything throughout the entire period to make sure all the devices were online and that there was no kind of cyber threats. A network monitoring system was installed to oversee those. The operations team helped with getting generators in place. In addition to those items, Kinra also wanted each home to have large screens that Rivera and Kyle Smith could look at from left to right or right to left, whatever their preference.
To achieve that, Kinra and Christian Smith put up an NFL clock that ran slightly ahead of live TV, had four screens Kyle Smith and Rivera could use, a digital draft board, an 80-inch TV on a stand, a 32-inch TV as a monitor and a 55-inch TV on the other side. Live cameras for the NFL were installed and set up using iPhones on tripods to stream what was happening in Rivera’s and Kyle Smith’s houses. Kinra and Christian Smith also installed physical routers into each home, then plugged and physically wired all of the different devices, so everything was a hardwire connection. They didn’t rely on wireless for the virtual draft.
Kyle Smith and Rivera were the final two stops on Kinra and Christian Smith’s virtual draft set up a tour and got the most extensive setup of the aforementioned group, meaning by the time they got there, they’d had a good deal of practice. So much so that the pair only spent 30 minutes to an hour in each home and in one day of work to recreate the football folks’ meeting rooms. And whenever they went over anyone’s house, the IT team wore all the necessary safety gear such as masks and gloves and made a point to touch as little as possible.
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From there, the team worked on running down mock draft scenarios. What would happen if there was a catastrophic equipment breakdown just as the primary person was making the pick; how does the pick get communicated to the next person? They ran through trade offers as the clock was counting down, and went through four rounds of the draft a couple of times to make sure Rivera and Kyle Smith felt comfortable.
When the houses were all set up, Kinra and Christian Smith had the team run a test and asked the football folks to connect. Two more internal mock drafts were scheduled before Washington participated in a league-wide mock draft with all 32 teams. For both the mock drafts and the actual draft, Kinra was at Rivera’s house and Christian Smith was at Kyle Smith’s house to ensure there could be an immediate response in case of emergency. As Rivera sat in his basement during the draft, Kinra sat in a corner out of view for all three days. Same with Christian Smith, who sat in the kitchen as Kyle Smith was stationed in his living room.
“It was great; I loved it, personally,” Kinra said. “I’m a big fan of football. Coach was extremely nice; his wife was very warm and made it feel comfortable to be in his house. … It was a lot of fun to see them communicate and things to go the way they went, and they were ready. It was pretty cool. You could see that they put in a lot of work to be ready for the draft. And they were on the same page, which was pretty cool.”
Success is sometimes when no one has a complaint. When things go right, the response tends toward ‘Oh, that’s what it’s supposed to do.’ The moment of it coming together is anticlimactic, because of all of the planning and everything that happened before the draft started.
When asked if he preferred Washington picking early in the first round or being further back, Christian Smith laughed and said in this instance he preferred the No. 2 pick, because it allowed him to let his guard down finally. His favorite part was assisting with potential problems to find a solution, going through with the solution and seeing it work.
For Kinra, he came away from the experience proud of his team’s effort, that everyone in his department used this as a bonding moment, and the football folks got what they wanted. That was something both Kinra and Christian Smith wanted to make a point about was that none of what fans saw would’ve been possible without a massive team effort.
Similar to game day when people are working in the background to make that experience feasible, this time, the people working behind the scenes were forced to come to light because of what it took to put on a virtual draft. And when they were asked to step up, and the spotlight was on their work, Washington’s IT department delivered.
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“Oh, definitely in the beginning, so we can go through it and see, ‘Oh, OK, everything works so we can breathe easier now,'” Christian Smith said. “That first night, when everything went smoothly, I was like, ‘OK, I can breathe now.’ Everything has been put in place; everything works, everything is happy, so I can let my guard down a little bit and kinda enjoy the process now.
“Oh, I (did a silent fist pump.) You know the Tiger Woods one, like, ‘Yes!’ Yup, with the red polo jersey and the hat on, too.”
(Photo: Getty Images / Getty Images)