This week, I updated our Scouts by Area Grid, the team-by-team scouting assignments for the evaluators on all 32 teams. I got to it a little later than normal this year, but I put a lot of work into it, contacting all the teams to make sure I got the most accurate information possible. Along the way, I learned a few things. Here are a few insights about how teams are building their staffs right now.

• Several teams (11, to be exact) have carved out a new area called ‘mid-Atlantic.’ It’s basically the area from the Carolinas west as far as far as Kansas and Oklahoma. OK, maybe it’s not a new area, but it seems to be gaining in popularity, and I can see why. It includes some of the smaller P4 schools, but also some of the heavy-duty G6s like Tulsa and Memphis and several decent MAC schools.
• At the same time, we’re seeing fewer and fewer teams that have scouts in all five major regions (Southwest, Southeast, Midwest, Northeast and West Coast). Four teams don’t have Southwest scouts. Four don’t have Midwest scouts. Three don’t have West Coast scouts, which really doesn’t add up given all the space that has to be covered on the Pacific side of the country. There’s probably never been a better time to be a scouting assistant than now. Seems like there’s making school visits almost immediately.
• Speaking of the West Coast and the responsibilities that come with covering it, there are two former high-level executives, Eric Stokes (Seahawks) and JoJo Wooden (Ravens), who are covering that area. I don’t expect either to be there for long, but it’s an indication of how much teams value mature evaluators in that region.
• I don’t have totals, but looking at the scouts patrolling the Southeast these days, it’s amazing how many are in their first few years of scouting. We’re seeing far fewer established scouts running the roads in Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, the Carolinas and so forth. My guess is that because teams have grown so much at the executive level, a lot of those upper-level evaluators are hitting the Southeast pretty hard. They need fewer real decision-makers in that area.
• At the same time, I think scouts in the Midwest are incrementally more senior than their Southeast counterparts. Is it because the Big Ten is overtaking the SEC in talent? Or because executives need someone they can trust evaluating Nebraska, Michigan and Ohio State while they focus on Alabama and Ole Miss?
• I think more teams are promoting Area Scouts to National (or, sometimes, Senior) Scout titles, but not giving them over-the-top responsibilities. Instead, they’re handing them a more senior title but, I suspect, not giving them a lot of compensation to go with it (or any real change to their duties). This is just a theory, but as teams look for ways to pay their growing analytics staffs, something has to give. Hopefully we’ll learn more about that when we conduct our salary surveys in January.