Via the Detroit Lions, below is a transcript of what head coach Jim Schwartz had to say during a press conference following the Jonte Green and Travis Lewis picks on Saturday.
On what he thinks the team accomplished over the past three days: "We stuck to our plan, got some good players."
On whether drafting three players from Oklahoma was coincidental: "We don't rate them higher because they're from Oklahoma, but it just worked out that way. We're excited to have them all. They've had a good program and those guys have been very productive over the years."
On what adding so many players on defense does for the team: "I guess that's yet to be seen. Drafting them doesn't do anything other than drafting them. They have to play well in preseason and training camp and they have to prove their draft status. So yeah, it adds more guys to the roster and creates competition and things like that - but I don't want to minimize how excited about those guys, we are."
On LB Travis Lewis: "Four-year starter; been very productive there. He played this last year hurt - he broke his toe early in the season and it affected him. But if you look back, he has a history of production at a Big 12 school. He was Big 12 Freshman of the Year, has been on the All-Big 12 team a bunch of times. He didn't run real well, but if you watch him on the field, he plays fast. As much as anything, a guy that steps right on the field in college at a major level of competition and starts for four years, I've got a lot of respect for that. He showed a lot of toughness this year and he's been productive."
On whether drafting six straight defensive players was coincidental: "Pretty much, yeah."
"What happens is, the further down the draft you get, the more players you get that are at the same level. The higher you go up in the draft, there's differences between the talent, the farther you get down, but it really didn't matter. It was opportunity and it was chances to get guys that fit profiles of what we wanted and we had plans for.
"Again, it doesn't do a whole lot of good to draft a guy that you really don't have a plan for or doesn't fit what you're looking for in a position, regardless of how much talent he has. As much as we say, ‘Talent rules the board,' it's talent that fits us and we thought all those opportunities were good for us."
On how they plan to acquire a third quarterback: "That will be one of the things that we'll probably be looking for. But with rosters the way they are, we're going to be signing a lot of guys here over the next two hours or so."
On CB Jonte Green: "He's fast; he's almost six-feet tall. He's fast, he's aggressive, he had good grades from the scouts. We also sent our secondary coach out there to look at him; we brought him in here last week to get him a physical. He jumped through a lot of hoops for us. We liked his combination of size, speed and aggressiveness. He's an aggressive tackler."
On the process of trying to sign rookie free agents now that the draft is over: "There's a lot of different layers to it. You have signing bonuses and some guys you're competing on money, some guys you're not competing on money; sometimes you think you got a guy and then you find out 15 minutes later somebody beat you on an offer and things like that. It's a lot like we talked about having deals to move up in the draft and deals to move back and some of them come to fruition and some of them don't. It's all hands on deck; everybody's going to be working hard to try to get guys under contract and not just get guys under contract, but get guys that have a chance to make our team."
On the importance of the rookie free agent period after the draft: "I think everybody recognizes the importance of it and every team has success stories. Every team has guys that weren't drafted that end up making their team. Some of them become starters and some of them have great careers - most of them don't, but I think everybody recognizes the importance of it."
On drafting three cornerbacks: "We liked all three of those guys and we drafted them because we liked them and we thought they fit the job description. We didn't draft them because you guys thought that we needed to improve our secondary."
On when the rookies will report for their mini-camp: "We'll have it not next weekend, but the weekend after that. Then we'll transition right to our offseason program."
On why he pushed back the rookie mini-camp: "Because they come in the very next week, that Monday. Rather than bring them here, turn around and send them back, bring them back, that whole thing, we'll be able to just transition them and bring them right here... They'll have the first few days by themselves before we put them with the rest of the vets."
On if they've settled into a scouting process they're really comfortable with over the past few years: "It's just like football schemes, it changes a little bit from year-to-year. Things sort of come in and things sort of come out; there are certain trends that happen that you might look at and some of it are based on some of the successes or failures. You evaluate your draft process, not just on the guys that you drafted, but the guys you passed on and how they were successful with another team or maybe they failed with another team. All that just builds a database of information and yeah, just like in anything, you're going to change a little bit. You're going to react to certain things that happen and you want to stay ahead of some curves and things like that. Just like coaching. Plays that we ran last year were slightly different than the year before; same thing defensively and things like that. That's just the nature of any business. You've got to move with the times."
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