CLEVELAND, Ohio (92.3 The Fan) – Some around the NFL might feel paralyzed by having to relocate their war room from team facilities to their homes, but not Andrew Berry.
The only question for the Browns’ first-year executive vice president of football operations and general manager is where to set up shop – kitchen, living room, dining room, den or basement?
“We are fortunate to live in an age of technology,” Berry said Friday morning on a conference call.
Berry and the Browns have embraced the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic is presenting the league leading up to the NFL Draft, which for the first time will be a virtual experience April 23-25.
“I feel confident we’ll have a high-quality draft,” Berry said. “We're going to be prepared and ready to go, regardless of the circumstances. I'm really confident we're going to have a strong draft.”
The walls in typical NFL war rooms are covered with charts, rosters and prospect information cards. Books of information along with computers and phones are typically spread across rows of tables that are surrounded by scouts, executives, coaches and – for the Browns – ownership.
Berry, who has a master’s degree in computer science from Harvard, hasn’t been hampered by the walls of data being turned into spreadsheets these past few weeks.
“A lot of the stuff that we use, they are database tools,” Berry said. “In terms of physically moving things, that is really not a challenge for us. The bigger challenge is just setting up effective communication protocols because you do run into issues sometimes where someone at their home does not have a strong internet signal and maybe they go out for a few minutes or there is a latency issue.
“In terms of our information, a lot of that is housed in our internal database. Fortunately, again, we live in the age of technology where we have FaceTime, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and just even picking up the phone and giving people a call.”
With NFL facilities shut down, this year, everyone will be on the phone or video conference instead of in the room.
“It really hasn't slowed the free agency or draft process,” Berry said.
Once the “virtual war room” is set up at Berry’s house, he and his staff plan multiple mock run throughs to ensure everything technologically is operating well as well as their communication organizationally.
They’re also planning for the worst.
“We are going to make sure that we are prepared in any decision-making scenario that we have what we need if there was to be a kind of a Armageddon scenario with power, internet access or something along those lines,” Berry said.
For Berry, making trades during the draft shouldn’t be a problem either.
“A lot of those trades are executed by phone. We are still going to be on the line with the league office. We will still are going to be on the line with other teams,” Berry said. “From that standpoint, absent if there was a power outage or something along those lines from either of the two clubs, I think that is something that is going to operate largely the same on draft weekend.”
