NFL scouting

Football scouting has some of the same problems that baseball scouting used to suffer from prior to Bill Beene.

The problem is probably worse in football because most of the high draft picks come from storied teams that have only one or two serious games a year, games that they have any risk of losing going in.

Those games don’t tell you much because the effect is usually symmetrical, two 15-0 or 14-1 teams going at it and they suddenly have to respond to a new situation.   You don’t find out how the losers will integrate the effects of the loss and make changes.  You don’t know how the winners would respond to those changes and if they would have won a rematch. 

The college system is a disaster for scouting.  You take the best players from high schools and feeder college and create a system where they will have little meaningful testing for 2-4 years, their stats will be artificially inflated and then you dump them into the draft after corrupting most of the potentially useful information about them.

In college ball the stars will be mostly dealing with opposing teams that are 10% slower, 6 inches shorter and 50 pounds lighter. They will knock them around like bowling pins.   It doesn’t tell you much other than that the rules of billiard ball physics apply to human bodies.

Worst, you will never find out much about how these stars react to adversity, and be training them not to expect it. 

When they hit the NFL, on average the players will be on .500 teams.   The better the player, the more likely the player will be drafted by a losing team.   You take somebody that was 58-2 in four years of college ball and put them on a team that was 1-15 last year.   They are smaller, slower than the opposition.   You have to put the 350 pound gorilla that will hit you in .9 seconds out of your mind so that you laser a pass 50 yards downfield instead of throwing an interception.

In other words, college ball is all about giving the top players the wrong mindset for the NFL.

What you want to know is, how do you deal with adversity.  That is more important than anything else. 

40 yard dash?  Great stuff for receivers and runners for the 3-4 times per season that they are free and clear except they have to outrun somebody to the goal line, and for the players that have to stop them.

Some picks will still be obvious because their size, speed and other stats will still be better than anybody at the NFL level.

But heart needs to be a factor.

In the David vs. Goliath matches of the college superstar teams and the rest of the world, you learn more about the Davids than the Goliaths.

It could be a defensive lineman that consistently punches through to get to the quarterback. 

It could be a quarterback or receiver or running back that tries to carry the team on their back.

Too many people in football fold their cards and go home if they get 10 points down.  There are far too few serious come from behind victories. 

The scouts need some system of weighting to reflect that the success of a player is to some extent the success of the team that he is with.

You want to look for players like Darren Sproles, who is a touchdown threat any time he is on the field although he might be the smallest guy in the NFL, Jeremy Shockey who can score touchdowns and get key receptions while hopping on one foot with a broken leg, that kind of heart. 

There are lots of others.  Doug Flutie in football, Cliff Ronning, Theuren Fleury and Doug Gilmore in hockey.   A lot of times the smallest guy on a sports team is the best guy on the team or at least has the most heart.   I remember so many times Cliff Ronning scored the lone goal for the Vancouver Canucks when the rest of the team just mailed it in.

If I were scouting, my starting place would be first, to rank the come from behind victories in college ball by how many points a team was behind, and look for the cause of that, and also look for the biggest upsets.

I would be looking at those from both directions, who to pick and who not to pick.   Some teams give up when they are behind.  A lot of teams also can’t be bothered if they think that they are going up against an inferior team.  

The Steelers and Ravens especially have dropped a lot of games in recent years to inferior opponents. That means too many players can’t be bothered to prepare for inferior opponents. It isn’t a winning work ethic.

If I were a coach, one of the things I’d be saying would be, every game is the f-ing Superbowl.  If your head isn’t in the game, don’t show up.  We’ll play somebody that wants to be there.

Aaron Rodgers was passed on for first division college ball because scouts thought he was too short.

Too short or too light has been a prejudice in a lot of sports for a long time.

Talented short players often have the most heart.  You need a balance of course so you don’t get just run over. Just bear in mind that the truism that short players can’t make it in sports, like all truisms, is false.

I would also make an analogy with business.  The further up you go in business management, the greater the average height.  Height outweighs talent and heart even in business.   

But something interesting happens with CEOs.  CEO’s on average are shorter than average height.

Look at Tom Brady, disrespected for so long, drafted in the sixth round, kept as fourth string quarterback and hanging on and making the best of his chances to be the most successful quarterback of the last decade.

Kurt Warner was disrespected so often.  He had to spend years in other leagues before he got his break.  He was the second most effective playoff quarterback since 2000.  He also had to restart in Arizona after an injury.  Nobody would touch him and he restarted as a backup quarterback.

Drew Brees was also released due to injury by the San Diego Chargers, in one of their worst moves ever. 

That certain injuries end a player’s career is another one of those false truisms that keeps causing teams to give up money and wins. 

Elway got his two Superbowls after his career ending arm injury.   Fortunately he had those in Denver because they had the sense to keep him.  If he got those two Superbowls somewhere else after his career ending injury that would have been really frustrating.

Really, a lot of this is the tabloid treatment given to Britney or Paris or Jennifer.   With a lot of this crap it would make as much sense as saying the player had a baby bump.  Except that coaches and GMs seem to be really making decisions this way.

Somebody needs to interest Bill Beene and apply his type of analysis to football. 

Maybe try hiring basketball’s Kobe Bryant to do personel interviews as well.

Kobe Bryant has curiously attributed some of the attitudes that make him successful to the influence of Michael Jackson, who is not even a sports star.   I think that is because commitment has a recognizable form. 

What if for the first time in your life success is not handed to you.  Are you going to take it? You are no longer on the best team in the league.  You get drafted by the worst.  Is that going to break your spirit, will you just mail in the effort?  These are the most important questions and I doubt if anybody is asking them.

Bryant probably works harder than the rest of the players on his basketball team combined and it shows.  It would almost be disparaging to describe him as talented because that’s less than half the reason for his success.

Bryant would be a great football scout.  The numbers don’t tell you enough. At the same time they may tell you too much, and amount to disinformation.