How Darrick Yray Brought the NFL Front Office Blueprint to Westwood
Darrick Yray is running Westwood's personnel department with the technology and rigor of the league's best front offices.
College roster building doesn't run on a recruiting calendar anymore. It runs on a clock. The transfer portal opens, a player enters the pool, and a program has about as long as it takes to finish a coffee to decide whether he fits. Efficiency decides rosters now. Whoever organizes the most information the fastest wins.
Darrick Yray has spent his career learning that lesson. Fresno State, Oregon State, and four years as Florida State's General Manager of Personnel, where he helped build the 2023 team that won 13 games and the ACC Championship. That roster produced a program-record 25 All-ACC selections and sent an ACC-best 10 players to the 2024 NFL Draft, headlined by first-round pick Jared Verse. Football Scoops named him the country's Player Personnel Director of the Year. Every one of his four signing classes at FSU ranked in the top 20 nationally.
In December 2025, two decisions in three weeks reset a program’s trajectory. First, the program in Westwood hired Bob Chesney, fresh off a Sun Belt Championship at James Madison and a 132-51 career coaching record, the first sitting head coach the program had hired since 1971. Then Chesney called Yray.
40+
Transfers signed in the class
No. 11
National ranking, On3
6
weeks from hire to signed class
A Class Built in Six Weeks
What followed the hire was less a coaching transition than a live demonstration of Yray's whole philosophy. In the six weeks between Chesney's hire and the close of the January transfer window, Westwood built a transfer class of more than forty players, ranked No. 11 nationally and No. 2 in the Big Ten by On3, addressing the defensive line, offensive line, and receiver room in one motion. Ten transfers followed Chesney straight from James Madison.
“The portal happens in a vacuum. Someone enters and you've got thirty minutes to make a call. There's no version of building a class that fast with a brand-new staff without more information, faster, to make better-informed decisions."
Compounding Teamworks Player Personnel Experience
That speed wasn't new to Yray. It just had higher stakes. At Florida State, he was already one of the highest-usage evaluators on Teamworks Player Personnel in the country: 290-plus hours and 18,000-plus actions logged in his first year on the platform, then more than 1,000 hours and 100,000-plus actions before his second year was out.
He wasn't waiting for the industry to catch up to data-driven scouting. He was already running his department that way. “I believed in the Teamworks vision early,” he says. “You could see where the market was going and what Teamworks could build and acquire over time. Committing early meant we weren't playing catch-up later.”
One Platform, Not Five Tools
Walk through what Yray actually built inside Player Personnel and the front office comparison stops sounding like a marketing line. Pro personnel and college personnel used to live in entirely different systems: one set of tools for the current roster, another for the portal, a separate trip to film, a separate spreadsheet for agent contacts. Yray collapsed all of it into one workspace: comparables, depth charts, agent lists, and film watched directly inside the platform instead of a second login somewhere else. When a scouting playlist is ready, it goes straight to a position coach's phone. He watches fifteen clips, sends back his read, and it's logged before the staff meeting even starts.
A Westwood Transformation
That's the actual case for Westwood's rebuild. Not that it hired a good GM, though it did, but that it hired someone who already thinks like an NFL front office and gave him the platform NFL front offices run on: one database, one source of truth, every evaluation, every depth chart, every agent conversation compounding into the next one. “NFL teams run off one database,” Yray says. “Everything uploaded, everything in one place. That's where college is headed, and not every platform has the capital or the roadmap to get there. Teamworks does.”
Six weeks built a transfer class. What Yray is actually building is slower and bigger: a personnel department at Westwood that operates like the ones he's spent his career learning from, and gets sharper every cycle instead of starting over.