NFL Rumors: Scot McCloughan, Gareon Conley, Draft, Panthers

Scot McCloughan

• Mike Garafolo of NFL Media reports that former Redskins GM Scot McCloughan’s influence is still on the Redskins’ draft board.
• Washington has added some things to their draft and conducted their own work since McCloughan was fired a few days into free agency.
• Interestingly enough, Garafolo adds that McCloughan is back running his scouting service as he did previously and has actually advised other teams about this year’s draft class.
• Garafolo stresses that he isn’t giving away information about the Redskins, and is instead providing his own perspective on draft prospects.

Gareon Conley

• Jason La Canfora admits that he could be in the minority on this, but he’s more convinced now that Ohio State CB Gareon Conley will be selected in the first round after making more phone calls to sources.

Draft

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell mentioned that 14 cities have representatives in attendance for the draft in Philadelphia to gauge how the event goes before making a potential 2018 bid.

“I don’t know who came up with that, but there are 14 cities here that wouldn’t agree with that,” Goodell said of the report that Dallas is considered the favorite to host next year’s draft, via NFL.com. “They really love the draft. I think they see the opportunity here. There’s a lot of competition for this, and I think Philadelphia has raised the bar. One of the things we want to take from this experience is to see what went well, see what went wrong and see what we can improve on.

“Other cities are obviously watching. There are 14 here and we’re going to raise the bar. So I think the bids will change in the next couple of weeks.”

Panthers

• Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk spoke with a source with knowledge of the dynamics who believes the talk of the Panthers drafting Stanford RB Christian McCaffrey at No. 8 overall is “likely a smokescreen.
• According to Florio, McCaffrey’s range is currently believed to be between No. 5 through No. 15.
• Florio adds that anyone interested in McCaffrey drafting after the Panthers could consider moving up ahead of Carolina to get McCaffrey, assuming they’re buying the Panthers’ reported interest in him.