Tuesday night, we had our annual Zoom session aimed at aspiring NFL scouts. It’s become a kind of end-of-the-year tradition. Last year, we had director-level scouts from the 49ers, Chargers and Vikings. This year, we had Brandon Yeargan (Raiders), Tyler Lyon (Chargers) and Rick Spielman, who until recently was the GM in Minnesota.

Here are a few of the highlights from last night.

On marriage/relationships: None of the three put off serious romantic relationships, though they all discussed the value of preparing their now-spouses for the rigors of life in pro football. Brandon and Tyler both met their future spouses in college, then nursed the relationships along for several years (most of a decade for Tyler; Brandon maintained a long-distance relationship for three years while with the Patriots).

On professional relationships: Rick is still on good terms with the Vikings, who let him go in January. In fact, things are still so close that team representatives were the first to reach out when Rick’s South Florida home was hit by a hurricane earlier this year. Head coach Kevin O’Connell has even spent time picking his brain. Spielman was fired by Nick Saban in his Dolphin days, but today, he works as a consultant for the Crimson Tide football team. 

On paying dues: Though Tyler was a highly recruited quarterback at Arizona, and his father was a longtime high school football coach, he worked hard to develop his own contacts in the industry, even writing for small online draft publications while attending law school. Brandon played at a small North Carolina college, Davidson, but made his way to Chapel Hill, where he was an intern, then a grad assistant, for the Tarheels. He worked for little or no pay there for several years, then did the same for the Patriots before finally making area scout. Rick build the athletic program from the ground up at a small college in Columbus, Ohio, when he got his big break with BLESTO.

On developing your evaluation skills: All three said the best qualities in scouting assistant hires had nothing to do with an eye for talent. Instead, it’s about treating every menial task as if it’s crucial to the performance of the team. Tyler even said he’d be more interested in hiring someone with no evaluation skills but a great attitude over someone with a stack of reports and hopes of making GM in 2-3 years.

If you’re an aspiring scout, we hope you can make it next year (we don’t record these sessions to encourage transparency and candor). It’s part of our special annual rate for prospective NFL evaluators. Let us know if you’d like more details. We also encourage you to sign up for our weekly newsletter, which you can do here.

Thursday night, former Vikings and Dolphins GM Rick Spielman graciously agreed to join me for a one-hour Zoom session. Joined by about 40 NFL scouts and executives, we took a deep dive into team-building and player evaluation as I asked him 10 questions about the game. We opened it up only to NFL personnel eager to develop professionally and willing to give up an evening during their vacation to do it.

It was a riveting hour and he had some very interesting things to say. Here are four takeaways you might find helpful if your aim is to be an NFL scout someday.

• Regarding analytics, Rick gave a lengthy, nuanced answer. One thing I found interesting is that the team was able to find some metrics for players who continually failed (i.e., defensive linemen without a minimum arm length, height and 40 time). They were able to rule them out as draftees. The other area they found analytics helpful was in sorting through the hundreds of players in the late Day 3/UDFA range. Again, the analytics team was able to find players with certain height/weight/speed combinations who had a better chance of success than others. He gave and return specialists Marcus Sherels, whom the team picked up as a UDFA in 2010, and WO Adam Thielen, whom the team signed out of Mankato State in 2013, as examples of players the analytics squad helped identify as possible success stories.
• When asked how a young scout can get past the party line when trying to get sensitive information from a school’s NFL liaison, Rick didn’t sugarcoat things: it only comes with relationships and years of building trust. That’s a problem today with NFL teams hiring younger and younger scouts and sending them out on the road with very limited networks and contacts. It’s inevitable that these less-seasoned evaluators get fewer details until they become more familiar around the campuses they cover.
• When asked about the worst thing you can do in an interview for an NFL job, he said that failing to do research was the easy answer. He gave as examples any correspondence that asked for a job from “Chris” Spielman, his brother (a former Lions player and current team executive). However, it was more about how much homework a job applicant had done. One dead giveaway: if Rick concluded the interview and asked for questions, but the interviewee had none, that was a dead giveaway that the applicant wasn’t prepared, and wouldn’t be hired.
• He expressed concern about how elite prospects might approach pro days and the combine in the wake of David Ojabo’s injury at Michigan’s pro day last spring. He said the league has been focused on the player experience, especially at the combine, and could even see the league providing incentives to work out or making the combine less of a pure workout and more of a competition, though he didn’t expand on how that might be accomplished. Food for thought.

We’ll be talking plenty about the scouting industry, as we do every week, in tomorrow’s Friday Wrap. You can register for it here.

Scouts, agents, players and media have pointed to the 2022 NFL Draft to be special in a way that few have been, historically. The reason? Hundreds of players took advantage of their Covid year to skip the 2021 NFL Draft and enter the ’22 draft instead. Some scouts I’ve spoken to even feared that numerous players would slip through the cracks entirely due to the talent logjam.

So that’s the theory, but was it really true on draft weekend? I asked several NFL evaluators this week, and a couple were emphatic that the late talent pool was better than normal. “I would say that you had a bigger UDFA pool than you ever had, so it wouldn’t shock me if you see more UDFAs make teams this year,” said one scout. “You might have had 20 guys left on your draftable board in previous years. You probably had 30-35 guys left on your draftable board this year.” Said another, “Yes, heavier than normal talented player pool in 6th/7th and UDFA’s!, and a third added, “We signed a couple of guys that would have gotten drafted last year.”

However, others were just as adamant that it was a false narrative.

• “I think the initial thought a lot of people had going into the year was the draft would be really strong because of all the players going back to school for an extra year, but in reality, most were late round-to-(free agent) players. . . I think it was a little stronger Day 3 compared to the year before, but not like I think a lot of people thought it would be initially.”
• “I think the narrative was that, for sure, but once it came down to the end, it seemed like a regular amount of guys left after the draft. For sure, more names, but wouldn’t say more talent than years past.”

• “Only time will tell, but no, I don’t think (that was) true. I thought the high picks, three-quarters of the first round was light, weak. QB, RB, TE and DL (were below standard). The second round thru the end of Round 4 was stronger. . . I did not think it was over-stocked. Here and there, a few players might have got pushed (down).“

It’s one of those things we won’t know for sure for 3-4 years, but it’s interesting that there are mixed opinions on something that seemed so certain a year ago, when only 716 players signed with agents (about a third of the number who signed this year). 

We’ll talk more about scouting and player evaluation, including a roundup of the week’s hirings and firings, in this week’s Friday Wrap, which comes out (you guessed it) Friday. Go here to sign up if you don’t already receive it.