Marvin Lewis wants the draft to go back to April
Cincinnati Bengals coach Marvin Lewis isn't a proponent of the NFL holding the draft in May.
He's of the belief that the NFL should shift the draft back to April.
The league, citing a scheduling conflict with Radio City Music Hall, moved the draft to tonight and is reportedly contemplating shifting it back even further next year.
"I’d prefer to have the draft done where it was, in April, because now it’s a little bit in the way of football," Lewis said during a press conference this week. "This is time where we would be spending more time with the players, and now we are going back and forth between both because of that. You want to be finishing up the draft preparation prior to the draft, you don’t want to have it finished up two weeks earlier because of guys who have been injured are still doing workouts, evaluations and us bringing guys in."
Lewis made the point that this change is cutting into the valuable time the Bengals have to indoctrinate rookies into the NFL with the usual rookie minicamp.
"As far as teaching goes, it’s a great progression to have an opportunity for them to come and spend time at a rookie camp, have an opportunity to go home for a bit and absorb what they got exposed to, and then come back with the other players and to have the second time around," Lewis said. "To me, that’s a much better teaching progression, so then they get it again a third time when we go to training camp so they can get things locked down.
"We are kind of skipping a step of that now (the rookie camp) because there is no reason to bring those guys in next week, and then overwork them the next weekend because they are going to be the first guys that have all the soft tissue injuries. So we are going to skip that step in the process here."
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Aaron Wilson covers the Ravens for The Baltimore Sun
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This story originally appeared on Nationalfootballpost.com
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