Category Archives: Scouts

Three Things for Scouts, Agents and Trainers to Monitor This Fall

07 Friday Aug 2020

Posted by in Agents, Scouts

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

Just a few weeks ago in the Friday Wrap, we discussed the potential changes in an uncertain recruiting landscape dramatically affected by coronavirus. Just two weeks later, we are already getting answers to the questions we asked in our July 24 edition. Let’s look at the changes, make a few new points and ask a few more questions.

  • These opt-outs are a test: No matter how you feel about the merits of their decisions, players who are opting out are an experiment. Will they preserve their draft status despite not playing? When we asked active NFL scouts a few weeks back in this space, the number most came up was about 20 players who can pull this off (here are the players we’d guess can do it). We already know that top players skip the Senior Bowl by the bushel, and in recent seasons, players like Christian McCaffrey and Leonard Fournette have skipped their teams’ bowl games without a draft penalty. Will the next generation skip their last year of eligibility without effect? We’ll know in about 10 months.
  • This is another blow to the agent middle class: Based on our conversations with people in the business, the players who’ve opted out already (and the ones we’ve heard are strongly considering it) will receive full stipends through the draft. Normally, you’re looking at anywhere from $5,000-$10,000/month for four months, depending on the player and the agency. That adds $30,000-$40,000 to the pre-draft tab before you figure in training (about $20,000 conservatively, including food, residence and rental car). Agencies used to get that back in fees over the life of the first contract, but in the days of the one-percent deal (or zero) and slotted salaries post-2011 CBA, it’s all on getting to the second deal and charging three percent. There are no guarantees. It’s been a tough landscape for middle-class firms for a while now. This year — coming off a year when fewer UDFAs were signed and there were no tryout players — could be a real death blow to those who make unwise financial decisions.
  • Some combine prep facilities, as well as agencies, won’t make it to 2022: Today, the success of a combine prep facility is predicated on four things: geographical location (you pretty much better be in the Sun Belt); ability to find reasonably priced lodging (incredibly hard on short-term leases, especially in splashy settings like Miami, Phoenix and Los Angeles); what you do the other nine months of the year; and your ability to recruit and win over the top prospects, obviously. Many solid combine prep facilities have been forced to close down during the lockdowns, and that takes a huge toll when you have thin margins (and yes, most of these facilities have thin margins, despite beliefs to the contrary). The lion’s share of the players who’ll train from now until the draft will go to the top facilities, so the smaller sites won’t benefit from that. It’s going to be another tough year.

In today’s Friday Wrap, we’ll talk about what’s ahead for the scouting profession, based on hiring practices this summer. Give it a look this evening. If you still need to register, click here.

Lessons and Insights Learned from a Summer of Speaking with Scouts

26 Friday Jun 2020

Posted by in Scouts

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

This summer, we at Inside the League have focused greatly on bringing leading industry voices to online platforms in order to interface with active NFL scouts, agents and executives. We’ve found it to be the best way to connect people in the era of social distancing.

At the same time, there’s nothing like sitting across the table from someone, and we’ve done a little breaking of bread with our friends in the industry, as well. Between Zoom sessions and power lunches, we’ve learned quite a bit about the industry. Here are a few lessons learned this summer, especially as they relate to character evaluation in the draft process.

  • If the pro liaison loves a kid, maybe you shouldn’t: The pro liaison tends to be the guy who tells scouts the party line. Normally, he’s the one who’s going to give you the info a head coach would almost say in a press conference setting. In other words, just the facts, presented with a smile and maybe a positive spin. The players whose attitudes are best are the ones who’ll be bragged on in meetings with pro liaisons. To get the unedited version on a player, a scout typically has to speak to a coach on staff that he knows, or the strength coach. Strength coaches are typically less political.
  • A kid without a father in the home has to be judged differently from one who doesn’t: A young man who grew up with a father in the home is more likely to understand that a coach screaming at him still loves him. Maybe his father ripped him for not taking out the garbage or for mowing but not edging — he knows his father is still gonna be there at dinnertime asking him about his day, making sure he’s got what he needs, hugging him at bedtime, etc. A young man without a father in the home is more likely to see a coach berating him as someone seeking a confrontation. He’ll either tune out or, in other cases, answer with his fists.
  • Houston, Atlanta and Miami are the party cities: You better know what you have with a kid who is drafted by the Falcons, Dolphins and, yes, Texans. These are perceived as the cities where you can really get yourself in trouble with women, alcohol and drugs, or all three. Give a kid money and a lot of free time, and he’s liable to get over his skis, quickly. Or at least that’s the reputation.
  • There’s a lot of nuance to a young man’s background aside from his legal history: The example I was given was of a kid who was raised in Mississippi, a state with a low-performing educational system. If he came out of Oxford, he’s more likely to have a stable upbringing and less trouble with schooling and structure. If he is from Jackson, it depends on whether he was in private school or public school. Public school kids saw things that kids in private schools didn’t. The geographical regions of the state are also very telling. This is true of several states, but Mississippi is one place where the hometown can be very indicative of what kind of kid he is.
  • Failing a drug test means different things at different schools: For example, at LSU, after your first failure you are given certain terms, and if you meet those, you are given a clean state. In other words, you are back at zero. After failure No. 2, you are given a chance to go to rehab, and if you take that option (which is voluntary), you are treated differently from someone who doesn’t. Because schools like LSU and Texas have traditionally been very patient with those who have a problem with marijuana, kids who are kicked out for their drug problems are valued very differently from those schools who might have a zero tolerance policy.

If we’ve just whet your appetite, we encourage you to register for our Friday Wrap, in which we discuss all manner of industry-related topics each week. This week, we’ll focus on the Zoom sessions with industry professionals that we’ve already hosted as well as what’s to come later this summer. Here’s a peek at last week’s edition.

How Is An NFL Scouting Dept Built? A Look at Five Teams

12 Friday Jun 2020

Posted by in Scouts

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

49ersColtsEaglesRavensSaintsNFL avg.
Scouting Assts311411.78
Combine Scout110.43
Scouting Coordinator111111
Area Scouts553845.75
Reg/Nat/Exec/Cross/Sr212152.03
Directors/Asst Directors2251.72
VP/DPP/AGM312311.56
Pro Scouting Dept543143.06
Analytics Dept.226332.91
Total211824201920.3

Last week, in the Friday Wrap, we looked at how today’s NFL scouting departments are built. How many scouts usually make up the scouting department? How big is a typical analytics team? Is middle management a big part of most teams’ evaluation department? We presented all our numbers on our website.

That’s a pay link, so rather than snub all those people who aren’t our clients, we’ve presented five teams’ results above. We feel these are five of the better-drafting teams in the league; in fact, three of them (the Saints in ’17, the Colts in ’18 and the 49ers in ’19) won the Best Draft Award as voted on by NFL scouts.

We’ll be talking about commonalities and differences among the these five teams (and the nuances that don’t show up in a grid) Friday on SiriusXM NFL Radio channel 88 with Alex Marvez and Mark Dominik. I hope you can join us.

In the meantime, a few notes:

  • Following modern trends, the 49ers have three at the VP level. The team is also mostly on trend for number of ‘reinforcements,’ i.e., scouting assistants, though the team’s pro personnel analysts are most likely on deck to plug in as area scouts, as well.
  • The Colts have four members of their information systems department; we guessed that they were not in analytics, but more traditional infromation tech people instead. The team is also light on scouting assistants, though the team does have a football operations assistant (which we counted as a scouting assistant). Finally, though the team is light on analytics personnel, it’s believed to have a greater reliance on analytics (and successfully) than most teams.
  • The Eagles are one of the teams that draw a bright line between football operations and scouting, but who include their analytics professionals in football operations (at least per their job titles). They have a significant analytics presence. The team also is light on area scouts, and clearly uses its directors and assistant directors to get out on the road, as well.
  • The Ravens are another team that has two DPPs, plus a player personnel coordinator and a senior player personnel executive. This is why it’s fair to say the Ravens are one of the most committed teams when it comes to buildin through the draft, and they usually get results. We also termed the team’s three player personnnel assistants and one player personnel analyst as scouting assistants.
  • The Saints have a pretty streamlined operation, despite having three national scouts (which is pretty unusual). They achieve this by placing the scouting department in the hands of AGM Jeff Ireland, who also fills the college director role, and assigning much of the work many area scouts would do to their national scouts. Also, though the team has three staffers in analytics, Ireland and Co. tend to rely more on their own eyes than what the math tells them.

To check out our analysis of all 32 teams, click here.

ScoutSpeak: What’s Ahead for My Book on NFL Scouting

25 Monday May 2020

Posted by in Scouts

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

It took me a lot longer to write my first book than I ever thought it would. Thanks to the quarantine, Book 2 came together a lot more quickly, and I’m ready to get your feedback before I put the finishing touches on it.

It’s going to be called ScoutSpeak, and it’s a compilation of all the content, all the interviews, all the conversations I’ve had with scouts about NFL scouting over the past 18 years. I meet so many young people who want to get into scouting, and they alway ask the same questions. What is the job really like? How do I get a job? How do I keep from getting fired? There’s so much to say. This time, I hope to put it all in one place, and put it in the actual words of dozens of scouts and administrators, active and former.

Here’s a look at the breakdown so far:

  • 10 thoughts on the industry (6.6 percent): This is basically what I’ve taken away from closely studying the industry for almost two decades. Regardless of the cliches  you always hear about the draft and scouting, these are my takeaways about how players are really evaluated and really chosen.
  • The character question (6.6 percent): We always hear about players who slip due to character. Later, we see how some players conduct themselves and wonder why they didn’t fall in the draft. The way that character really impacts and influences the draft, based on what scouts have told me, is something I just had to include.
  • The UDFA process (9.8 percent): The two hours after the draft has always fascinated me, especially when you think about all the players who were passed over by all 32 teams for seven rounds, then went on to stardom.
  • Makeup of an NFL scouting department (6.6 percent): This is more of a nuts-and-bolts discussion of the difference between pro and college scouts, how the two combines work, etc.
  • Getting the job (21.3 percent): If there’s one question I’ve gotten more than any other, it’s this one. That’s why I devoted a fifth of the book to it.
  • Losing the job (6.6 percent): I figured if I focused on how to get the job, I should include this section, as well.
  • Doing the job (26.2 percent): I’ve always found people see scouts as incredibly intriguing and mysterious, so we devoted plenty of ink to this.
  • Why do players bust? (4.9 percent): This is the eternal question, and everyone has an opinion.
  • War stories (11.5 percent): Everyone loves to hear the stories of how picks are and were made, especially when names are named. I gotta tell you, too — some of them are truly hilarious.

So how am I doing? Am I on track? Are there things I should expand on? Are there things I should omit? I’d love to get your opinion. Hit me up at @InsideTheLeague when you can.

 

Where Do Today’s NFL Scouts Come From?

22 Friday May 2020

Posted by in Scouts

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

The bulk of the work done evaluating players for the NFL Draft is done by area scouts, the foot soldiers of the profession. At Inside the League, we spend a lot of time telling their stories and trying to make their jobs a little easier with our salary survey, helping out with pro days in March, and anything else.

Normally, May is when scouts get hired and fired. Obviously, this has not been a normal May, so rather than covering who’s coming and going, this week, we decided to take a long look at our Scouting Changes Grids from 2015-2019 to see where scouts are coming from, as well as what’s happening to the people who hold that title.

The perception is that older, more seasoned evaluators are no longer en vogue, and there’s a definite shelf life for old-school college scouts. At the same time, fresh-faced youngsters are more hirable than ever. But what do the numbers say?

We counted 90 NFL personnel professionals who took a job as area scout between 2015 and 2019 (college side only, not pro scout). Some ascended to the position from lower jobs. Some were area scouts who moved laterally to other teams, or who changed areas. Some had previously held more senior jobs and went back on the road simply to get back into the league. Here’s what we found.

  • For 71 of the 90, achieving area scout was a clear promotion.
  • Of the 71, almost half (31) were promoted from scouting assistant, which has become the most common way teams hire college evaluators.
  • Eighteen of the 70 were combine scouts (BLESTO or NFS), probably the second-most common route.
  • Eleven were in pro roles or assisted on both the pro and college side.
  • Four other scouts moved over from the pro side. All four were young scouts who were most likely being promoted, though it’s unclear if they received a bump in pay. Either way, probably good news for young scouts.
  • Three more came from non-NFL scouting services, though it’s important to note that two of the three had extensive pro football backgrounds and weren’t plucked capriciously from #DraftTwitter.
  • Another two hopped directly from other leagues (the CFL and Arena League) into area roles.
  • One was a college scouting coordinator who was sent on the road.
  • One moved over from the coaching side.

Another note: this is a hiring trend that has been sustained over the last five years. At least 10 new area scouts per year have been hired from within every year since 2015 (not counting this year, of course). In 2017, 22 (!) were elevated from scouting assistant and combine scout roles.

Of course, it wasn’t all good news for new area scouts. We identified 17 of the 90 who were taking a step down from national scout or a director-level position, presumably after a period of unemployment. Bottom line, the overwhelming majority of new area scout hires (81 percent) were people with limited experience who were promoted from within.

Two others didn’t fit any specific category and were hard to quantify.

We also counted 148 area scouts over the same time period (2015-2019) who experienced a change in job status. The news for these experienced evaluators was not as positive. We go into detail on how many received a promotion, mostly stayed static, or were pushed out of the business in the last five years in today’s Friday Wrap.

You can register for it here. It comes out this evening (6:30 p.m. CT), and if you’re interested in being an NFL scout, or you are one already, we recommend you give it a look.

 

A Look at Why NFL Scouts Get Hired and Fired

07 Thursday May 2020

Posted by in Scouts

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

In the last week, two seasoned area scouts have been non-renewed by their NFL teams. When I was new to the game, this used to puzzle me — why would you remove seasoned evaluators? Now that I’ve watched hiring practices for about a decade, it makes a lot more sense.

I’ve spent most of Thursday texting with several scouts and discussing the ‘brain drain’ in NFL scouting. This time of year, especially, I get asked about how you get (and keep) a job as an NFL scout. I’ll take a few of the texts I’ve received today and expand on them in an attempt to illustrate how modern teams hire and fire.

  • “Teams are hiring their buddies and using scout money on director positions. Creating spots but not hiring the workers.” — It’s a great point. If you want to surround yourself with people you trust, but the owner won’t increase your budget, you hire less-seasoned scouts. This has been a rising trend across the business for at least the last 2-3 years. It’s mainly because decision-making has become increasingly centralized while “metrics” for scouts are limited at best. When a scout is fired, you rarely hear from others that he was a bad scout (or even a good one). Very hard to pin accountability on any one scout, so reasons for dismissal are similarly elusive.
  • “Look at some of the staffs. Titans have two directors of player personnel. . . Buffalo has a director and assistant director at every position and a assistant GM.   Seattle has two directors of player personnel.  Miami has an asst GM and two personnel directors.” — I never thought about this before, but it makes a lot of sense. We’re seeing a lot of duplication of position in league front offices right now while we’re simultaneously seeing some pretty nebulous titles, like “executive scout” or “senior advisor.” It makes for a lot of chiefs and a limited number of Indians.
  • “I also think that guys can be slow to change at times and feel they have tenure in certain situations when they don’t and are making top dollar.” — This is another good point, and one that you don’t often hear from scouts. It’s the other side of the “why fire all the experienced scouts?” argument. Scouts often become entitled, especially after they have several years under their belts.
  • “. . . A scout’s presence at a school has to (include being) a good guest, too.” — I think this is as important as it’s ever been. As college head coaches’ salaries increase and the pressure to win grows higher than ever, there’s less transparency and sometimes less of an open-door policy for scouts. I hear often from college personnel directors and recruiting staffers that they’d love to accommodate scouts, but at the end of the day, that doesn’t keep them employed. I get it.

We’ll talk more about NFL scouting and what’s happening in the NFL evaluation community in the Friday Wrap, which comes out at 6:30 p.m. CT tomorrow. If you haven’t registered for it already, I’d love it if you did, and I think you would, too.

 

ITL Zoom Scouting Meetup: Some Words of Wisdom from ex-NFL Scout Bob Morris

15 Wednesday Apr 2020

Posted by in Scouts

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Tuesday night, we had our first Zoom meet-up for aspiring NFL scouts. I hosted it with guest Bob Morris, a longtime friend who’s spent time in the Alliance of American Football and XFL as well as 15 years in the league with the Browns and 49ers. You might also have seen him on our Twitter feed, as he led several ITL-assisted pro days over the last three weeks (like this one).

Bob spent an hour with five members of the college personnel community (Austin Schaffer of Cincinnati, Price Burton of Toledo, Drew Hixson of Kansas, Connor Anderson of Texas State and Zach Gold of Temple). Here are a few takeaways.

  • One question we got was, how do you make your case to a coach when the analytics fit but the coach rejects the player, or vice versa? Bob said it’s best to sit with the coach and calmly make your case. If you can point to a previous player that fits your mold and turned out to be a success, that’s the best way. Examples always trump theory, obviously.
  • Bob was also asked how old is too old when it comes to pursuing a scouting career. He didn’t put a number on things, instead referring to family and relationships to make that decision. With that said, teams are hiring younger and younger evaluators; it’s as simple as that. Bob also observed that, more and more, the job vacated by a veteran scout as he moves from Team A to Team B is usually filled from within by a scouting assistant at Team A.
  • Bob also guarded against spending too much time in self-promotion. He said longtime college head coach Bill Mallory (Indiana, Colorado, Miami of Ohio, Northern Illinois), who served as a mentor of sorts for Bob, always told him to let his work be his sales pitch.
  • One way to do that, Bob said, is to be totally prepared when a scout is in the building. Anticipate what he’ll need, what questions he’ll ask, and where he’ll need to go when he’s making his rounds, whether or not you’re the NFL liaison. I know that’s common sense, but it’s still true.
  • He also said that, while in San Francisco, GM Trent Baalke would ask all the scouts if there was someone they’d met on the road who had what it took to work for the 49ers. Bob mentioned Niners area scout Steve Rubio, formerly the director of player personnel at Tennessee, as one scout who made his way up that way.
  • Also common sense: if you’re at a school with more talent, you’ll have a better chance of getting recognized. Personnel directors and NFL liaisons at Alabama, Ohio State and Texas stand a better chance of becoming scouts because they’re just going to get more face time with NFL evaluators.

This won’t be our last meet-up, and I look forward to connecting other former members of the NFL scouting world with aspiring scouts from the college evaluation community. Interested in joining us? Hit us up on Twitter or contact us here.

How Will the Coronavirus Impact NFL Scouting and Agent Practices? Three Possibilities

03 Friday Apr 2020

Posted by in Agents, Scouts

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

What will life look like on the other side of the coronavirus — presuming we ever get there? I don’t know. But I’m willing to make a few predictions on how football will change, especially as it relates to how agents, scouts and trainers work. Here are a few.

Video visits will become capped: Now that we’re all more comfortable with Zoom, it’s become a lot easier to work remotely. Before this year, the only way teams could bring a player “in-house” was with their allotted 30 visits in March and April. Teams are getting around this now, however, with Zoom visits; New Orleans Football chronicled a detailed visit the Saints had with Utah St. QB Jordan Love this week. The NFL’s Competition Committee is pretty rigid about eliminating any advantages one team might have over another. I could see the league either lumping these in with the 30 visits, or creating a new rule for total number of virtual visits.

Trainers will put in a coronavirus clause: Combine prep trainers are the IRS of the agent industry. Many complain about them and feel like they are way too much trouble  and demand too much money. I wonder if contract advisors still feel this way after several trainers have risked state sanctions to open their venues for workouts, or have reached out to me to find ex-scouts to run pro days. Most trainers are excellent at what they do, but they don’t have big staffs who can set up pro days. It’s the kind of mission creep trainers hate, but that agents expect. Trainers often struggle just to get payment for their services; I could see most of them strictly defining their services going forward, and restricting all provision of services beyond training until they’ve received full compensation.

Traditional scouting becomes newly valued: About two-thirds of pro days were cancelled this year, which means there’s a drastic cutback on the triangle numbers of hundreds of prospects. This means there will be a lot more evaluation done the old-fashioned way. My hope is that teams use this time to reinforce old-style film breakdown with the new wave of young scouts who’ve been hired the last 4-5 years. I also hope that teams draw on their scouting reports rather than falling in love with a prospect’s well-rehearsed in-person interview. Finally, I hope it also means some veterans get extended, or at least not axed. You gotta keep some of the gray-haired guys around sometimes. They have something to offer.

We’ll take a further look at how people in the game are dealing with the crisis today in the Friday Wrap, which comes out this evening. If you haven’t already, register for it here.

2020 NFL Draft Process, Coronavirus Edition: How Scouts, Agents, Players Are Adjusting

27 Friday Mar 2020

Posted by in Agents, Coaches, Scouts

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

Obviously we’re in an unprecedented time. Here are a few observations on how the football world is shifting to accommodate the coronavirus situation, and how we’re trying to be a small part of the solution.

  • It looked bad for open venues this week, so we moved several up in an attempt to stay ahead of the closings. As a result, we were able to get two in on Tuesday in Dallas and one in Tampa, thanks to former NFL evaluators Bob Morris (Browns, 49ers) and Richard Shelton (Titans). Bob handled things in Dallas and Richard in Tampa. Unfortunately, our instincts were correct. We had a workout in New Orleans slated for today, but the venue was shuttered on Thursday. We’re hoping two pro days we have scheduled for today in Atlanta go off without a hitch (ex-Raiders scout Von Hutchins and Mike Hagen, last with the Chiefs, are calling the shots there).
  • Because we’ve brought in former NFL personnel to run these pro days — sort of serving as a ‘proctor’ for the big exams — we’ve gotten good feedback from NFL teams. Contacts with two teams have asked for all the numbers from our scouts’ pro days, and we’ve been happy to oblige. Meanwhile, our RT of a Twitter post on another player drew an immediate response from a director-level scout with another team. If you’re a player or agent, don’t think for a minute that teams aren’t working overtime to make the best of these strange circumstances.
  • We’re pretty excited about the response we’ve gotten on our Google Form that will supplement the work the APT Coalition (the consortium of NFL scouts that shares pro day information during a normal March) normally does. We’ve gotten more than 300 players’ information so far with about 48 hours to go before we pull the plug and ship it out to all 32 teams. “Through your help, I’m down to 27 players that I need draft info for,” said one scout that we’ve been trying to help with player, agent and college contacts. We’re hoping that after this weekend, those remaining 27 players’ contacts (and their agents, of course) are in his notebook.
  • One note about that Google form: a handful of agents included their contact info but not their players’ contacts. While we understand that they represent the players, scouts are not going to want to have to go through a third party to collect simple information about draft prospects over the next month before the draft. We’ve removed all entries that omitted players’ info, but not to worry: we’ll send out the form one last time this evening.
  • Of course, if you’d like to update things immediately, we also sent out the link to all NFLPA-licensed contract advisors last Friday at 6:30 p.m., Monday at 6 a.m. and Wednesday at 6 a.m. (all times central). The link is somewhere in your inbox if you’re a licensed agent, so check your trash.
  • We’re hoping to be part of a national solution to the lack of pro days in mid-April. We’re working on a project that, hopefully, can bring a neutral, professionally run local workout to hundreds of players. Fingers crossed, of course, that we’ll have open venues and some return to normalcy by Easter.

That’s all we have so far. Hopefully, we’re still moving in the right direction. For more on how “the new normal” is affecting the data-gathering process and how teams are adapting, check out today’s Friday Wrap. You can register for it here.

 

Ask the Scouts: How Does the Coronavirus Shutdown Affect the NFL Draft?

13 Friday Mar 2020

Posted by in Scouts

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

,

The coronavirus is here. Some famous people have contracted it. Some people (the elderly, the infirm, the very young) are especially vulnerable to it. Social distancing, hand-washing and other measures are important. If you’re already sick, you need to stay home, and take every precaution to not make others ill. All of this we know.

Still, sometimes, there’s a thin line between caution and panic, and we don’t live in a vacuum. We won’t know for weeks, maybe years, if the various league shutdowns, postponements and delays were warranted, but we know, categorically, that the response to the medical emergency will have an unintended impact on many people. Among them are the thousands of players competing to land on 90-man rosters in 41 days.

Without trivializing those for whom coronavirus may prove harmful or fatal, we reached out to several NFL scouts to see how the cancellation of pro days and T-30 visits would affect the draft. Did they see it having a substantial impact?

  • “Hard to say. Like the spread of the virus itself, lots of unknowns. (T-30) visits are a great opportunity for many to endear themselves to decision-makers above and beyond the tape. Pro days can have the same effects on area scouts, where a positive impression can motivate a scout to push all-in on a recommendation.”
  • “Really will affect the guys who would’ve tested well who were under the radar who warrant another look, as well as the small-school guys who pop out of nowhere. Film will matter more than ever for sure.”
  • “Uncharted territory. We would probably be more accurate if we drafted now before the fog of confusion sets in. They haven’t played a game since January. Biggest concern would be medical scores for non-combine guys.”
  • “It’s going to have an effect across the board. Teams won’t be able to relieve character or mental concerns on players who they have questions on. Late-round and undrafted guys who can usually separate themselves by testing well won’t have that opportunity. Who knows how combine medical rechecks will be effected?”
  • “Huge repercussions. Affects every level of the draft. The film will take precedence. Combine performances will be bigger influences now, more than pro days. Teams always want more info, (and) they’ll feel restricted.”

We’ll look at the impact the of the virus and the way various schools, conferences and leagues have responded to it in today’s Friday Wrap. It comes out this evening at 6:30 p.m., and if you’re in the business (or aspire to be), we encourage you to check it out. You can register for it here.