Monthly Archives: February 2015

Long shots

10 Tuesday Feb 2015

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I had a couple of experiences this weekend that really underlined the passion of young athletes trying to live their football dreams, but also the confusion that surrounds such pursuits. The irony is that young men trying to star on football fields as players face almost the same odds as those seeking to ‘star’ off the field as scouts, agents, or executives in the game. Both of this weekend’s experiences involved the Arena Football League.

  • On Sunday, I attended an open tryout for the AFL’s Los Angeles Kiss in Southeast Houston. Around 100 young men showed up, with about half of them walk-ups, i.e., they weren’t even sure they wanted to work out until Sunday. Some were drinking beer in the parking lot before the workout. That didn’t stop their wives, girlfriends, kids, parents, and friends from filling the bleachers for the tryout, which cost $80 in advance/$95 day of tryout (cash only). There were probably as many people watching as there were trying out. I often wonder if the players attending these tryouts know what’s ahead of them if they make it. Most of these players make around $700/game and have their apartments and food taken care of. Their personnel director told me today that none were offered contracts, but about four were good enough that they may be offered a chance to come to L.A. to work out with the team at some point. They won’t be offered a contract; they’ll just have their expenses covered while they remain in AFL limbo, hoping to be put on the roster. Think about that; the number of players who might get a chance to play in the AFL off that tryout was about four percent, and those players will only get a chance to play, with no guarantees. Yet their loved ones were there on Sunday with their phones out, filming every sprint and every jump, and probably holding out hope that their player would get ‘discovered.’
  • The previous day, I had gotten a call from a good friend. He’s a great guy and his family is close to mine. He has become friends with a young man who played some college football at various small-school stops and even took part in a number of indoor football games over the past 18 months or so. My friend has taken a paternal interest in him, and really believes in the young man’s athleticism and chance to play in the NFL someday. At any rate, the young man attended an AFL workout in New Orleans on Saturday, and apparently drew a little interest from a team official, though it wasn’t enough for him to be offered a contract. At any rate, my friend was calling because he hoped I would be able to get the young man a tryout with the Texans. My initial reaction was to chuckle and insist that I’m not nearly as connected as my friend thinks I am. My second reaction, however, was to caution him that the young man is still almost as far away from his NFL dreams as he was before the tryout in New Orleans. I told my friend, in fact, that he would have to stick out so much at that tryout that even a toddler would call him a stone-cold baller if he were indeed an NFL talent. I’d even go so far as to say my friend needs to encourage the young man to get on with his life rather than continuing to pour time, money and effort into NFL pursuits.

Though both of these anecdotes provide a dose of gravity to the process and are perhaps heavy on desperation, you can’t fault these players’ desire. You need to have no less a drive to succeed in football if your goal is to work in the business.

WSW2: Another Perspective on Matthews

09 Monday Feb 2015

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Today, I turned things over to Ken Moll, who two years ago was running the scouting department for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Ken is the scout who ‘discovered’ Seahawks WO Chris Matthews, who excelled in Seattle’s Super Bowl loss to the Patriots two weekends ago. Here’s Ken’s story on identifying and signing Matthews.

 

“I try to do things geographically. During the spring, I hit as many pro days as I could, including Ball State, Louisville, Western Kentucky, Vanderbilt, University of Tennessee, anywhere in about a three- to five-hour circle. I didn’t go much further than that. I mean, I went to (University of Alabama-Birmingham) and Alabama one year, but pretty much I went to Kentucky every year. (Matthews) was a guy that I had marked, but we didn’t have a spot for him. He was a junior college kid, and he comes into Kentucky, and he has a decent junior year and a big senior year as far as amount of catches, more than (former UK teammate and present Packers WO Randall) Cobb. And he had really big hands, he had length, and ran OK at his pro day, though he didn’t have great speed. But he’s 6-5 and I bet he weighed more than 218 .. . and really refined his route-running his second year at UK.

“We had lost a guy named Greg Carr, a big tall kid from Florida State, and he was a good player for us the year before, and after the second year, he was one of the free agents we wanted to resign and we didn’t get it done. (Carr) was very similar to (Matthews). (Winnipeg GM) Joe (Mack) and I got on the horn and we wanted to find another big receiver, and I remembered him, and he didn’t run great, he ran OK, but he could catch the crap out of the ball and was just so big. On turf at (Kentucky’s) indoor facility, he ran in the upper 4.6 range, but had enough functional speed that he wasn’t awkward or gawky. He could run for a big guy, and the catches you saw him make in the Super Bowl, he did that all the time in the CFL. You don’t find those big guys up in the CFL, and at times, he was covered but he wasn’t covered. He was just so big. He was tougher than this Carr kid. Chris was a little shorter but thicker and could go in traffic and get it.

“I’m pretty sure, when I found him, I tried to call and I think he was in Arena Ball at the time, and I remember getting on the phone with him and I think we just took my numbers from a year before (and signed him without working him out). Who knows? He could have looked like a cabdriver, but I’m big on working a guy out again, at least weigh and measure, but I think we took him sight unseen and they loved him up there, and they said, ‘wow, where do you find these big guys that can catch,’ and all I can tell you is, he runs fast enough.

“You only have enough room for a (certain number) of guys, and we didn’t’ want to have five receivers that were 6-4 or 6-5. Chris didn’t have a lot of run-after-the-catch ability, and half the time he was covered, but he’d just reach over guys and make catches. In the practices, the coaches would love him. If you don’t have the speed — I mean, you can’t be flat-out slow — but I said, OK, I need to find a big guy. I mean, Carr had ran like a 4.54 or something like that, and they were similar in route-running, but the whole package was better. Chris was a little stronger, a little more competitive, and caught the ball slightly better.”

WSW: Chris Matthews’ Story

06 Friday Feb 2015

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We missed out on War Story Wednesday again, so we’re going to have a two-part War Story that starts on Friday and continues until Monday.

After WO Chris Matthews had a great Super Bowl last weekend, I did a little research on him. Turns out his agent and the then-CFL scout who ‘discovered’ him are both good friends, so I turned to each of them to tell Chris’ story. Here’s Rodney’s story. On Monday, we’ll tell it from the perspective of former Winnipeg Director of Player Personnel Ken Moll.

Today, we’ll start with Rodney Edwards, his agent. I asked him to tell the story of Chris’ road from undrafted free agent to two other leagues before starring on the big stage.

“Chris signed as an undrafted free agent with the Browns after the (2011) draft, and he went to the last cut. He didn’t make the practice squad and got cut. Then he got a two-game suspension on a prescription with codeine that he took for a toothache, so no teams picked him up, and we couldn’t get him a tryout. So he went back home, and I think he worked at Foot Locker in Los Angeles.

“Then he went to the Arena League, I think with the Iowa Barnstormers, and played maybe eight games. Then he went to Canada, to Winnipeg, in the spring. There, a scout (Winnipeg Director of Player Personnel Ken Moll) saw him and said he wanted to take a look at him, and wanted to know, was he still in Kentucky? I told him no, he’s playing Arena. So they brought him to Canada — I tell all my free agent guys to get their passport so if they get the call to go to Canada, they can go – and he went to minicamp with them. They signed him, and when the CFL season started, he went to camp and made the cut.

“That year, he had about 1,000 yards receiving, 81 catches and 14 TDs, and he was the CFL Offensive Rookie of the Year. Then the next season, a lot of teams came and looked at him from the NFL, and I thought he was going to get bought out of his contract but he wasn’t. So we went into the (CFL) season, and could never get back on track. He had several nagging injuries — a shoulder, butt, and ankle injury — and I think he finished the season with like maybe 200, 300 yards receiving, if that. He was kind of worried he’d have to stay in the CFL, and I told him I wouldn’t do another CFL deal.

“So our first workout was with Indianapolis, and our second was with Minnesota. Then he went to Kansas City, then Green Bay, then Seattle. Seattle was his last workout. (The workouts were) like boom, boom, boom, one after another, even while I was on vacation. NFL teams had wanted to wait until the (CFL) season was over, so they worked him out starting in February, and it went all the way up until April, and (Seattle) resigned him right before the NFL draft.

“He made the practice squad the first week, then they cut him and sent him home. Then they brought him back, and I don’t remember the date. Then they cut him again, and he worked out for Washington. Washington didn’t sign him, so the Seahawks brought him back, then cut him again. I think the Seahawks cut him four times (total). So then he worked out for the Giants but didn’t sign, and finally the Seahawks signed him in October, latter part or in early November, and he was on the roster ever since.

“I didn’t really have to bug teams (to get him workouts), but when it first initially started, I called several teams. After Indianapolis called back and we got a workout, after that first workout, I told others, ‘he’s starting to get interest, and if you’re interested, you need to get in this pool, he’s gonna make a decision pretty soon,’ and several teams called but never could schedule workouts, and after the Seattle workout he signed.”

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

03 Tuesday Feb 2015

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On Monday, I got a question from a young agent who’s dedicated and hard-working. In the course of conducting his due diligence on the scouts he needs to know during the ’15 draft process, he asked me if Arizona — a state where a couple of his clients went to school — is considered a Southwest or West Coast area for the purposes of NFL teams.

I get this question all the time, and unfortunately, there’s no ‘answer’ to the question. Some teams consider Arizona West Coast, some consider it Southwest. Some teams don’t break the nation down by regions, but just assign small clumps of states to different scouts. I know one West Coast scout who doesn’t even live in the region he’s in; he’s on the East Coast.

This is one reason scouting and evaluation are so hard to measure. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that different teams not only do things differently, but they couldn’t care less how others do it. There’s one NFC team that has consistently struggled on draft day for at least the last decade-and-a-half, but continues with essentially the same personnel and the same methodology.

Part of this self-fulfilling prophecy is because no one has developed a consistent metric for evaluating scouts. Maybe it’s because no one wants to be held to an objective measure when it’s time to make changes in the scouting lineup. Maybe it’s because it’s so hard to truly evaluate the job a scout does. Maybe because it’s rare for just one scout to truly ‘discover’ a player, when most teams will send 3-4 pairs of eyes to evaluate everyone on their draft boards. Maybe it’s because scouting departments change philosophies so often, valuing character the most one year, athletic ability the next, size the following year, or even certain schools and regions at times. It’s really pretty murky.

It all goes back to one of the themes of this blog. If you think someone out there has things ‘on lock,’ you’re wrong. NFL teams are made up of human beings, and they make mistakes and fall back on comfortable but flawed methods. Even in a business that is filled with smart, efficient, capable people, there is opportunity if you can identify weaknesses and figure out how to make them strengths. It’s one of the things that makes this game, and this business, fascinating.

The Half-Percent

02 Monday Feb 2015

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I got a text this morning from a friend who used to run a CFL personnel department (Ken Moll, who’s written in this space a few times before). It started this way:

“Happy for this kid Chris Matthews (for Seattle). I brought him in to Winnipeg (from Arena ball, played at Kentucky). Also, I see where the Steelers signed a safety/LB (Ian Wild) who played at Mercyhurst, cut by the Bills out of college but can play . . . Given that there is no feeder-type league for the NFL, I believe the Canadian league (with the right person) needs more attention. Just a thought.”

Let me first say that I think Ken’s right. I think the CFL and AFL deserve more attention. But I always have people asking me about why there’s no feeder league for the NFL akin to the old NFL Europe model.

There are two reasons. No. 1, as I’ve discussed in this space previously, one could argue that the NFL has the best feeder system in the league in NCAA football, and it doesn’t cost them a cent. But the other issue is cost and the economy of finding and developing sleepers.

The NFL has almost unlimited resources, it’s true, but I still don’t think they’re excited about losing money. Let’s say they started some kind of feeder league with eight teams, just to keep things balanced, and they kept them all in Northeast markets, just to keep travel simple. By the time they rostered 45 players, paid a staff, covered travel and stadium costs and the other miscellaneous expenses, I think it would cost $500,000 to run each team, and I think that number is very conservative. So $4 million, at least, to run a feeder league.

So what would they net? That’s something we could argue. I think the results wouldn’t be a lot different from what they’re getting. Every March, NFL teams weigh, measure, time, etc., about 3,000 players at their pro days. Around 250 are drafted in April and about the same are signed as undrafted free agents, so let’s say 2,500 are turned into street free agents. The best of those players fan out to the AFL, CFL, and in some instances European leagues. At the most, maybe 15 of those players that didn’t make it into camps wind up back in the league and on 53-man rosters. That’s one half of one percent of the players that worked out for NFL scouts at pro days.

Also, keep in mind that the players that take the long road to the NFL are not Kurt Warners, or even as skilled as Chris Matthews. They’re usually one step above the practice squad. So the question becomes, how much does the NFL want to spend in order to find the 52nd or 53rd man on 10-15 NFL teams, annually? And keep in mind that Warner was really not a failure of the system, but of the Packers; he went to camp with the team when it had Brett Favre, Mark Brunell and even Ty Detmer on the roster. Eventually, his performance in the AFL got him an NFL chance without the league having to step in and create a league for him.

I think it would be great if there’s a minor league for the NFL; it’s incredibly fun when players like Matthews play a big role in a big game after toiling in obscurity for a long time. I just think the economics of such a league do not work.