A week before the NFL Draft and a week after Americans returned to the moon, Jake Kiser, the Bengals' Tsar of Technology, has taken us into Paycor Stadium's wired mission control of a draft room humming with enough data to send the nearest draftnick into orbit.

Since Kiser presided over the club's 2020 transformation when the league's draft went from Victorian to virtual, there haven't been major facelifts.

Until now.

Three massive screens emerging in the draft room represent how the cyber trio of director of football research Sam Francis, senior application developer Tyler Gross and scouting research analyst Trey LaBounty have supplemented the Bengals scouts and coaches in the Zooming 2020s.

"They don't make the decisions, but they make the draft come alive and make it more efficient," Kiser says. "From a technology standpoint, the tools are very similar to 2020. But the way we're leveraging those tools is really advanced."

It's not exactly JFK's decade of landing a man on the moon. But go back to the 2016 draft of Tyler Boyd and his Cincy area code of 513 career catches nestled at No. 55.

Like much of the league then, the dominant feature of the draft room was The Draft Board.

Opposite the sprawling view of the Ohio River ran a floor-to-ceiling handmade board stacked with magnetic tiles featuring the name of a prospect, height, weight, school and draft grade. The card could be moved manually according to its rank or spot on the meeting agenda, and, eventually, gently lifted by a long stick to another wall and placed under the name of the team that drafted him.

The opposite wall was devoted to the grease and markers of the man running the draft then and now, director of player personnel Duke Tobin. Current rankings, blossoming scenarios, outgoing trade proposals, internal hopes, could all be transformed with Tobin's rag and jotted again as he adjusted to consensus and circumstance.

As they pondered Boyd coming out of the University of Pittsburgh 10 years ago (Derrick Henry went 45 to the Titans, Jarran Reed went 49 to Seattle and old friend Mackensie Alexander went the pick before Boyd to Mike Zimmer's Vikings), the Bengals had all this information at their fingertips on computers and laptops throughout Paycor Stadium.

But technology and analytics were declaring war on the NFL. By the time Kiser and Gross had been hired in 2018, and Bengals head coach Zac Taylor arrived a year later with Francis, qualified people were matching the software explosion throughout the league.

Now, the Bengals were finding ways to superimpose the info they had in the computers into the draft room with every hug of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

The demarcation point came during the pandemic spring of 2020, when the first pick of the decade, Joe Burrow, came to the Bengals as he sat in his Athens, Ohio home. He was announced by Goodell in his New York man cave, while Kiser spent weeks before the draft wiring it all so Burrow could be welcomed by Taylor and Tobin from their own homes on the outskirts of Paycor.

"We had the information, but we were finding ways to make the process more efficient in real time," Kiser says. "The idea is simply to have everyone looking at the same thing at the same time. To be on the same page."

Now picture the new-look scene leading up to next Thursday's 10^th pick.

In the right corner hidden by three computer screens (a nest Tobin calls "the cockpit,") sits LaBounty. As the draft unfolds, he's in the cockpit controlling what people want to see on the big screens that are unfurled against one of the walls. Two are high-resolution 85-inch screens and one is 90 inches with the same 4K resolution.

The far big screen is an overview snapshot showing all 32 teams listed in columns in order of the draft in real time, complete with the needs of each team that can be found in the Bengals' pro scouting app that the scouts update regularly.

When a need is met during the draft, it changes color, making it easier and faster to see what a team would want in a potential trade.

On the middle screen is a more focused draft, also working in real time. The current selection is displayed with the next eight picks or so accompanied by which players those teams have already been drafted.

"What makes this draft different is just the enhancements to the process," Kiser says. "There's more live data in front of people right away."

The third screen, the 90-incher, is TBA, Kiser says. One option is the app listing every pick of the draft in order, from the Raiders' No. 1 to the Broncos' No. 257. The trio has developed it so that a possible trade can be computed in seconds, complete with the value comparison of two different trade charts.

But Gross says any of the applications they've built (and you can't count them) can pop on a screen on a second's notice.

For instance, if they're debating a prospect and want to find a comparison ("a comp," as they say), they don't have to cursor back to the 2018 draft file and then click it on a projector for the rest of the room to see. Or copy and paste from the 2012 Bengals Draft notebook.

Now, the comp app flashes on the screen, and the five or so comps from past drafts are sorted and stacked against the prospect in this draft with all their measurables flowing through a chart.

"Nothing can replace the grind of the film by the scouts," Tobin says. "But having elite organization and display of the data can really increase the efficiency of the process and decision-making. It allows people to spend more time on task with what's really important."

The big board still lives opposite the river. But it shoots out of a projector. The prospect's report filed by the Bengals' scouts can be accessed with a click. Another click, and the prospect's tape from various games and workouts appear on a board once teeming with magnets.

Not exactly man landing on the moon. But consider that the draft's moderator, Bengals president Mike Brown, was born the month of radio's first traffic reports in 1935.

"We've come a long way," Kiser says. "But it's still people using and developing tools, understanding what they're seeing, and making the decisions. We're just trying to give them as much information as fast as possible, as efficiently as possible."