When NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announces that the New York Jets are “officially on the clock” during this month’s NFL Draft, the franchise will have an opportunity to reshape its roster by choosing some of the best college talent available. And with four picks at the time of this writing – including No. 2 overall – within the first 44 selections, the need to add several impact players is paramount as they face off against some of the AFC’s best teams.

It is a task that is not taken lightly by the Jets’ coaches, front office and scouting department, who will be featured in the team’s draft room as they make their final decisions.

But that gathering is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to player evaluation, and the Jets are careful to explore every avenue available when assessing the thousands of players who are draft-eligible each season. Utilizing the latest technology to help them make more informed decisions is now a critical part of the team’s overall strategy.

“The draft is one of the primary ways in which we’re able to acquire talent, and it’s an extremely important event for us,” says Dan Zbojovsky, senior director, football operations for the Jets. “It’s a year-long process and oftentimes multi-year process for us to evaluate these players coming out of college and then get the opportunity to select them.”

A ‘Titan’ off the field

In the traditional draft scenario, teams receive dispatches from scouts around the country who file reports on players that range from height and weight measurements to 40-yard dash times to vertical leaps. Colleges will conduct Pro Days, in which scouts are invited to see a team’s top performers run drills and catch passes. And independent scouting services provide roundups of prospects major and minor, with their own evaluation systems.

In short, there’s a lot of information on a lot of potential draftees, and that doesn’t even include each NFL team’s own preferences based on organizational philosophy, coaching schemes and roster needs. While some teams prefer to keep things more analog, the Jets have been at the forefront of embracing technology to help them prepare not only for the draft but also the fast-paced nature of an NFL season.

The team’s proprietary Titan app (winkingly named after the team’s original moniker, The Titans of New York) is the team’s “mothership” for football operations – a custom-built web application that contains essential tools for draft preparation, scouting and personnel strategy.

“Titan is really the hub behind everything we do on the football side,” says Paul Marsh, senior director of application development. “It’s a legacy application of 15 years now through many, many different iterations, but it’s always remained Titan. It is where all of our scouting and football data is housed. It is the view into that data and it enables the powers that be to help make their decisions and come up with their plans to help make the team win.”

Titan is built on Microsoft technology, including Microsoft Azure, GitHub Copilot and GitHub Actions. Marsh’s team relies on GitHub Copilot to speed up coding, prototyping and iteration, helping them gain greater efficiency when time is tight leading up to the draft. GitHub Actions are used to automate, build and deploy pipelines, enabling frequent updates and continuous integration across Titan’s modules.

Another key element of Titan is the team’s draft/trade calculator, a points-based tool the Jets use to evaluate draft-day trade scenarios. In real time, New York’s football brain trust can plug in picks, compare values and determine whether a proposed trade would result in a net gain or loss for the team.

“This is a UI that was designed really by our [general manager] and his close advisors to work the way that they want to work,” says Marsh, who has been with the Jets for 24 seasons. “And it simply allows them to kind of dig into the information and game plan on what they’re going to do going forward into the draft.”

The Jets’ process has paid off with several important contributors being acquired via the draft, including wide receiver and 2022 Offensive Rookie of the Year Garrett Wilson, 2025 No. 7 selection Armand Membou, defensive end Will McDonald IV, running backs Breece Hall and Braelon Allen, and tight end Mason Taylor.

Old school, meet new school

For Zbojovsky, who is entering his 19th season with the franchise, the draft successes reflect the balance the team uses when combining the old-school scouting mentality and the technology and analytics of the new school of player evaluation.

“[Titan] is an extremely important internal website for us, and we’ve made a lot of really cool advancements over the years on it,” he says.

“I think everything has its piece of the puzzle. On certain players, some parts might be a bigger piece of that puzzle. We like to, of course, rely on our film work as the foundation of our reports and our scouting evaluations, and then we can utilize all these other cool tools or data points to help inform those evaluations and really help us, whether it be our stacking of our players or comparing players to each other. And really it adds a little bit of an objective piece into what can be a largely subjective evaluation off film.”

Zbojovsky and Marsh work closely with each other to ensure that any late-bloomers, fast-risers or strategic adjustments are reflected quickly in Titan so that everyone is on the same page.

“We always joke that if the GM wanted to come down to our office and say, ‘I need a button here, here and here, and I need it to do these things,’ we’re working on that right out of the gate as soon as he leaves that office,” Marsh says.

“We’re able to turn around very, very quickly because we’re able to push those changes right into our Microsoft stack and get them in front of him before he hits the end of the hall. It’s the trust that we can get things done very quickly because these guys have deadlines that don’t move. We can’t push back the draft. We can’t push back free agency.”

The fastest agent at the Combine

The Jets recently wrapped their time at the NFL Combine in Indianapolis, where all 32 teams convene to scout draft prospects as they go through a whirlwind of testing and drills. Numbers and measurements are flying fast and furious, so the Jets, along with the league’s other squads, use the NFL Combine App to help surface the official Combine data to coaches and scouts.

A custom Copilot AI agent is built into the NFL Combine App to allow coaches and scouts to surface fast insights and prospect comparisons with natural language questions that allow teams to get information on, for example, the average, highest and lowest linebacker results for each drill since 2015.

“The Copilot feature not only allows us to ask questions and filter through the information that’s present at the time, but also compare that back to previous years,” Zbojovsky says.

“So you start to really be able to stack how this player not only performed against this cohort here, but also against players that are currently in the NFL. And that helps you start to really understand where that player’s performance metrics on the field might fit within the players that he’s going to be joining in the league.”

Let the countdown begin

In a league where every decision matters and every potential advantage could swing the final score, both Marsh and Zbojovsky are thankful that the Jets continue to see technology as an integral part of scouting and preparation.

“We really are in a great spot for what we need to do. It keeps us nimble,” Marsh says. “Talking to other organizations and other technology companies, they are impressed with how quickly we’re able to iterate and move to get those solutions. We’re not bogged down. We’re given a lot of flexibility and the trust to do what we need to do.”

When the Jets turn in their pick, it will be so much more than writing a name on a card to hand to the commissioner. It will be the final product of research, data, scouting and technology all coming together to welcome the next potential superstar to the NFL.

“A lot of work goes in from a lot of people throughout the organization,” Zbojovsky says.

“We incorporate a lot of different data points and different types of evaluations, whether it be analytics or our scouts. We put a lot of work behind that to make sure we get our board right in advance and then we see how things fall on draft day. We look forward to success in April.”

Top photo courtesy of the Jets.

Learn how the NFL is using AI on and off the field to enhance operations and read how technology could help the Minnesota Vikings build next year’s winning edge. 

Elliott Smith writes about AI and innovation at Microsoft, from how the Premier League is transforming its online presence to why AI may play a major role in saving the Amazon rainforest. Previously, Smith worked as a sports reporter in Washington, D.C., Washington state and Texas, covering high schools to the pros. You can contact him on LinkedIn.