Image courtesy of On3
FOXBOROUGH – First impressions are everything.
Gabe Jacas made sure his counted when he was in Foxborough a few weeks ago.
After New England took the Illinois edge rusher with the 55th overall pick in the second round of the NFL Draft on Thursday night – moving up to get him – Jacas talked about the 30-visit and what stood out during it.
“It’s honestly a blessing. You know, a lot of people ask me, like, ‘what was your favorite visit?’ And the Patriots always pop up in my mind,” he said. “And just, I felt like the structure and how they ran things; obviously, they were in the Super Bowl last year, but I feel like a lot of the guys, a lot of the players believe in the head coach and believe in who he is as a person. And I’m one person that can fall behind, and I just love the coaching staff and how they treated me when I got there. You know, they challenged me not only physically but mentally. Just the install, like I could just tell in their process, really try to make it hard to evaluate players. And, I just love the challenge and I love how they go about things and who they are, like, as a team, their identity. It’s kind of my brand of football. I love all the physicality and just how they are on the defense.
“Obviously, they got good guys up front, Christian Gonzalez, all those guys. Just looking forward to seeing them in the building and just getting to know everybody.”
In a video posted by the team, Mike Vrabel tells Jacas that the entire organization knew they had to have him once he left that afternoon.
“You are everything that we are about, man,” Vrabel said to him on the phone. “You came into our building on that visit and not one person…when you left here, everybody was like, ‘we’ve got to find a way to get this guy on our football team.”
Speaking to the media at the conclusion of round three, Eliot Wolf reiterated how impressive the visit with Jacas was and explained how the trade up went down.
“We were exploring the board and Gabe was the highest rated player we had on there, obviously at a position of need,” he said. “We just felt like rather than waiting, frankly, again, I said this last night about Caleb too, but I was a little bit surprised that he wasn’t off the board already. So, we tried to pull the trigger, we were calling a bunch of teams before we ended up making the trade. Fortunately, the Chargers wanted to acquire some more picks and we were able to get the player we coveted.
“As far as the visit, this guy’s high-energy. He’s all about football. He wants to be good. He’s powerful. The coaches were ecstatic when we were able to acquire him. The visit was a big part of that, just getting comfortable with him as a person.”