AP

The NFL news cycle at this time of the year is fueled by an endless stream of reports about draft-eligible players who are visiting various NFL cities. It’s happening in large part because there’s not much else going on.

The information, which becomes virtually impossible to compile and track in a comprehensive and reliable way, comes from: (1) players who admit it during interviews (often to the dismay of teams that prefer to keep it quiet); (2) agents who leak it in order to enhance the perception that there’s a demand for their clients; and (3) the teams themselves. Plenty of teams don’t advertise their intentions.

The Jaguars are. The dynamic emerged earlier this week, when Ian Rapoport of NFL Media posted multiple tweets identifying players the Jaguars would be hosting — which pointed to the Jaguars as the source of the information. And then the Jaguars dropped the façade entirely by posting an article on their website listing the players who visited.

Some teams will make their full roster of visits known with the goal of drafting someone in whom they have displayed no apparent interest. A decade ago, for example, the Broncos traded up to draft quarterback Jay Cutler despite having no contact with him at all during the entire pre-draft process.

For the Jaguars, it’s unclear whether they’ll go off the board to take a guy they haven’t met with, or whether their self-publicized list of visitors includes their eventual choice. Two years ago, the Jaguars had visited with quarterback Blake Bortles, but no one expected them to draft him. As Bortles explained during a Thursday visit to PFT Live on NBC Sports Radio, when he saw the 904 area code on his phone during round one of the 2014 draft, he assumed that a friend was calling him, not the Jaguars.

Whatever the Jaguars do and however they do it, the process has been working in recent years. Bortles is on the verge of becoming a true franchise quarterback, and the Jaguars have added other great young players like receiver Allen Robinson and linebacker Telvin Smith. If they can add an impact player or two this year, they could land back in the postseason for the first time since 2007.