Inside Broncos coach Sean Payton and GM George Paton’s NFL Draft prep

Mickey Loomis pondered the question, straightened his face and prepared his best deadpan.

A year ago, the longtime New Orleans general manager was asked how the pre-draft process changed without Sean Payton, who was settling into what ultimately would be one year away from coaching.

“Quieter,” Loomis said, pausing for the laughter he knew was coming from reporters.

“I’m making a joke at his expense,” he continued, explaining that he found the Saints’ preparation similar overall but altered without Payton, the veteran coach with a “strong voice.”

That strong voice now shares a draft room with Broncos general manager George Paton after 15 years of going through the process with Loomis.

In Denver, the pre-draft process is in many ways the ultimate football get-to-know-you between Payton and Paton. The two have not only spent hours together watching prospects ahead of the NFL Draft, which runs Thursday through Saturday, but they’ve bonded over their affinity for the art of scouting, honed in on what Payton believes to be the core necessities for Broncos players going forward and seemingly built a promising rapport through what has been a two-month mad dash.

“My first two drafts here, I thought the process was really good,” Paton said Thursday. “With the addition of Sean, we’ve enhanced it and we’ve taken the next step. Sean sits in all of our meetings. He sounds like a scout and he’s been around a lot of really good people throughout his career. He reminds me of (University of Alabama coach and former Miami Dolphins coach Nick) Saban just sitting in meetings. The two years I was with Coach Saban, they have a similar vision of how they want to build the football team.

“They have a clear vision on how they want to build the team.”

Having the vision, however, isn’t nearly enough in a Year 1. It must be conveyed to the general manager, then to the scouts, then distilled into a process by which everybody involved is on the same page, looking for the same types of players, getting those players in front of Payton and Paton for more evaluation and then slotted onto a draft board.

“When you start new, you try to create some mission statements,” Payton said. “What do we value? What’s important? We’ve done the same here. … That’s the importance of the months prior and the weeks prior (to the draft) and really trying to look at things with a clear lens.”

Payton has hinted at what those values look like. In February he talked about unselfishness, intelligence, toughness and discipline.

Then, build in what Payton and defensive coordinator Vance Joseph want to do schematically, how Payton views traits such as height, weight and athletic testing numbers for different positions, and what vice president of strength and performance Beau Lowery and team doctors consider acceptable from an injury history perspective.

“That sounds simple, but that’s a lot of damn work,” ESPN analyst and former scout and executive Louis Riddick told The Post. “Especially when you’re doing it in a condensed period of time like they’re doing it, though it’s no different than what anyone else has done. For Sean, the more rock-solid he is in his conviction as far as what he thinks works in the NFL, the easier it is for the scouts. The more wishy-washy you are, the harder it is for the scouts.

“Obviously, Sean’s not real wishy-washy about anything.”

In fact the opposite. Payton on Thursday laid out in detail why Denver’s draft room is set up the way it is and said some of his biggest arguments with Loomis over the years weren’t about whether to draft a receiver or an edge rusher but rather, “something silly like the parking spots, the Christmas tree that I didn’t like or the weight room carpet.”

Parking accommodations and carpet colors aren’t likely on the agenda for draft meetings, but adopting Payton’s football philosophies across the board — and to be clear, that’s the direction this goes, rather than a coach adjusting to his general manager’s preferred types of players — takes time.

Paton is running his third draft in Denver and he’s doing it with a third different head coach. Moving from Vic Fangio’s wish list to Nathaniel Hackett’s to Payton’s not only means adjusting your own ways, but it also makes roster continuity and stability all the more elusive.

“It’s like the worst position you can possibly be put in. It’s starting from scratch every single frickin’ time,” Riddick said. “Every coach is well within their right to come in there and (make changes). I think it would behoove coaches to not just throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, and try to salvage whatever they can and not just automatically say ‘Well, because I wasn’t here when all these guys were picked, they’re all (bad).’ Some coaches do that. At the same time, you can’t blame him if he goes, ‘This guy sucks, this guy sucks, this guy sucks, I don’t want him, he doesn’t fit, I had him before and it doesn’t work.’

“That puts a GM so far behind the 8-ball. You feel bad for him, but that’s the business.”

Paton put the challenge in simple terms.

“You always want to bring in players that fit the vision of the head coach and the coaching staff,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s probably not going to work. It really hasn’t changed per coach. They’re all different. I enjoyed working with the prior two coaches. It’s just the systems are different.”

In Riddick’s mind, the challenge becomes figuring out Payton’s systems quickly and adjusting the scouting as necessary, even if “that can have a scout’s head spinning,” he said.

“Especially early on in his tenure, he’s not just going to believe what Johnny Smith, the fifth-year West Coast regional scout, says about a guy. He’s going to want to have eyes on him. You want to try to limit the amount of work he has to do, too, so his eyes are in the right place.

“Quite honestly, Sean probably has the biggest job because he’s trying to figure out, ‘Who can I trust? I don’t want to spend all my time scouting guys,’ but he has to.”

The Broncos wrapped up their final draft prep meeting Monday and spent the rest of the week “doing special projects, clusters (of players) and trying to determine a consensus with the coaches and scouts,” Paton said.

“We kind of divide and conquer through these clusters,” he added. “We get a couple of coaches and scouts and they spread throughout their offices. Sean, myself and (assistant general manager Darren Mougey) stay in the team room. … Then we’ll bring them in, and we’ll discuss and discuss more.”

Labor-intensive work, to be sure, though Payton said he’s been impressed not only with his new general manger — “it’s been fantastic,” he glowed — but with some of the tools at their disposal in Denver.

“The analytics department is something that is on a different level here,” he said. “I’m like that driver of a new car that still hasn’t figured out how to get the seat warmers on. It’s pretty impressive, and it’s new for me in a good way.”

All the same, sometimes the only way to consensus is for the former scout and coach who sounds like a scout to slug through tape.

“(Wednesday) night, we probably watched 1,200 snaps of three players going back even to a season ago, because you really are trying to get (a sense of) the totality of what’s coming in the building,” Payton said.

The end goal is to pick the right player among those three and the hundreds of others who will be available when the Broncos hit the clock on Friday and Saturday.

“A big part of this whole equation of whether players are ultimately successful or not has nothing to do with your scouting acumen,” Riddick said. “It has everything to do with the development and utilization of the player once you get him. That’s about the communication between the coach, who’s establishing the philosophy, and you as the scout or GM that’s in charge of acquiring the talent. You’d better marry that up as well as you possibly can because … there’s just so many moving parts, man.

“In this case, when everything is condensed the way it is for Denver, this has been a helluva offseason for those guys.”

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