Category Archives: Scouts

Want to be an NFL Scout? Here Are A Few Tips

08 Monday May 2017

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Whenever someone asks me how to get a job in scouting, I tell them this story.

A few years ago, I was trying to figure out how to develop and market a program for budding NFL scouts. So I reached out to a friend (who would go on to be hired as a GM soon thereafter), and asked him, “So how does someone get a job in scouting?” His response: “Why? You got a guy?”

Here’s another quick story. Another friend in the business was in charge of hiring a scouting assistant for an NFL team a couple years ago, and I asked if I could recommend a couple candidates. “Well, OK, but I only want people who really fought their way up, paid their dues, and know what it’s like to really grind. I want someone who came up just like me.”

And there you have it: the two routes to becoming a scout. Either you start young and pour all your blood, sweat and tears into landing a personnel job and don’t stop until you get there, or you “know a guy.” It also helps if you’re the son of the owner or head coach.

This is why I don’t believe you can take a class to be an agent, or a scout, or a coach, or nearly anything else. No degree, certificate or other validation is going to get you a job in the game. It’s a people business. It’s only going to happen based on the relationships you build, how many opportunities you create for yourself, and the sacrifices you’re willing to make.

So how do you get opportunities? You have to get in front of scouts. If you’re working for an FBS school already, you simply have to build bridges with scouts when they come through. You need to make sure you’re the pro liaison, or work with the pro liaison, or find a way to interface with scouts. If nothing else, be there when they sign in for pro day. Here’s another tip — when you meet someone, write a handwritten note to them via the team (or the address on their biz card if you get one) and thank them for the meeting. You’ve got to make an impression and you’ve got to prove yourself capable.

But let’s say you don’t work for a school. Maybe you have a job and a family. If that’s the case, find a way to help with football activities. The best way to do that, and to make scouting contacts, is to volunteer for all-star games. The Senior Bowl is the best, and probably hardest to volunteer with. The Shrine Game is the No. 2 game, and has a pretty hardened group of volunteers with lengthy EWS service time. The NFLPA Bowl likes to do things a certain way and is a little exclusive. Then there’s the College Gridiron Showcase, the game played in the Dallas area that I advise. All four games are always looking for good helpers, but I think the CGS offers real opportunities, for several reasons that I’ll go into later.

I’ll talk more about how to create opportunities later this week. In the meantime, be on the lookout for ways to meet key people in the business. At the end of the day, that’s the best way to make connections that can lead you to your dreams.

The Bloodbath and the Aftermath

05 Friday May 2017

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If you follow ITL on Twitter, you know it’s been an incredible week for transition in NFL scouting departments, and not in a good way.

It began Sunday morning when 17 Bills scouts, both pro and college, woke up to find that not only were they let go, but their key cards didn’t open doors, their email addresses didn’t work, and they’d been wiped off the Website. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen an entire department (save for two scouting assistants) completely wiped out in one move. But that was just the warmup. From Sunday afternoon to Monday afternoon, we reported 11 scouts and evaluators from seven different teams that had lost their jobs. Several of them are good friends of mine, and friends of friends. I remember texting scouts and their responses were full of shock and grief. It was an incredibly difficult day.

So why did it happen? Why was it such a brutal week? I don’t know, but here are some possible ideas.

Belt-tightening: As everyone who follows NFL football knows, TV ratings were off by 10 percent this year. This doesn’t mean teams lost money in 2016, of course — not by a long shot — but it could have given the teams’ bean-counters a reason to recommend cutting expenses. One fact of life in the NFL is that scouts are probably the least respected football people in the building. The players, obviously, get the lion’s share of the money, and the coaches do pretty well, too. However, scouts are on an entirely different plain. If you aspire to be a scout one day, you need to understand that reality.

Analytics: It’s possible 2017 is the true ‘dawn’ of the age of analytics in football. I’m not sure why that would be, as the Browns’ move to go all-in for metrics hasn’t exactly resulted in success. On the other hand, Cleveland has done it, and for better or worse, the critics have pulled back to see if it works or not. Some teams could see this as their opportunity to lean on the younger, cheaper analytics experts in their offices rather than the 20-year area scout in his 50s. As with other big businesses, a lot of what NFL teams do is influenced by what kind of media blowback they risk.

No template: Because scouting is such a mysterious, subjective business practiced by a select few, and because football is so cyclical, no one can point to one strict way of doing things and pronounce, ‘this is how it’s done.’ Even the really good teams blow it with their first-rounders every once in a while. This allows teams to make moves that don’t seem to make sense to people in the business. Fans and outsiders just shrug their shoulders and presume that it all makes sense somehow.

Disposability: Scouts are not celebrities. There is no union for NFL scouts. By their nature, they work in anonymity. Fans don’t know them. This means that when a scout is let go, it doesn’t make big headlines. Sometimes, a team just removes the scout’s name from its Website and never even makes an announcement. What’s more, there’s always a scouting assistant waiting for someone to retire, get fired, etc. In general, I just don’t see value attached to the experience and network a seasoned scout has.

Though Black Monday is behind us, we’re a long way from seeing all the changes in scouting departments that come in May. Time will tell if there’s even more transition next week. In the meantime, if being a scout is what you aspire to, please proceed with caution.

 

A Brief History of NFL Draft Hype

28 Friday Apr 2017

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This week, a tweet about the vapidness of NFL draft hype got me thinking about how we all spend January through April. Ironically, it came from a draft pundit. You might be surprised to learn that I find the NFL draft a little painful. Well, not the draft itself, but its coverage.

It’s troublesome to me that every year, for 4-5 months, football fandom buys into the incessant praise of players who haven’t even set foot on an NFL field yet. What’s truly irksome, however, is the parade of draft pundits who make pronouncements on players or teams with no accountability. How do people become famous by making a serious of statements that include ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if’ or ‘it’s possible that’ or ‘it’s likely that,’ etc.?  It got me thinking about how we got here.

Thirty years ago or so, a few teams started trying to bring scouting into the 20th century, so they agreed to get together and have players work out at a central location. It was around this time that ESPN, which didn’t have a lot of live sports coverage (outside of tractor pulls and Australian Rules Football), decided to broadcast the draft. They tried several people as pundits (Joel Buchsbaum was lousy on camera, while Sports Illustrated’s Paul Zimmerman got into an on-air fight with a fellow broadcaster) before settling on little-known Mel Kiper Jr. This was long before draft news was anything anyone cared about.

Brick by brick, the game of football grew in popularity, and the combine progressed as well. Then the Internet was invented, and soon, every fan could find someone with news, opinion, or both on the draft. Those fans could also express their own opinions, first through blogs and newsgroups, and then by Twitter and other social media platforms. These days, we have not one but two major networks (ESPN and the NFL Network) going pick by pick through the draft, and we have play-by-play dissection of practices at the major all-star games, as well as up-close coverage during the combine. I guess, to some degree, NFL draft coverage has been the perfect marriage of technology and the nation’s obsession with pro football, and that’s great. But something about the way it’s packaged and over-produced drives me crazy.

I know my aggravation with all of this puts me in the minority. I guess, at the end of the day, I don’t see this as entertainment, and don’t think it should be treated that way. You always read these stories about how ‘football is just a game’ and ‘when (some crazy illness or death) happens, it really puts football in perspective,’ but really, that’s not true.

For the fan, the NFL is just a game, a way to put aside the world and escape. But tell that to the player from a poor background trying to reset the course of his family’s life. Tell that to the scouts that have never done anything else in their professional lives, then get fired due to a GM change or belt-tightening. Tell that to the coaches who get their lives torn apart on social media because their teams didn’t win enough games to satisfy fans’ bloodlust.

There’s a lot of money in football, but that doesn’t mean everyone in it spends all their time rolling around in cash. In fact, most of them spend 10-12 hours working hard to keep their jobs, and the other half of the day worrying about what happens if they don’t. This game is fun, but it’s also deadly serious.

Here’s Why Gauging a Team’s Draft Interest Is So Hard

21 Friday Apr 2017

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For the last couple months, you could barely surf the Web without plowing into dozens of stories, tweets, blogs and the like telling you who’s going to go where in the draft. Naturally, you need to take all of these reports with a grain of salt, whether you’re an agent or just a fan. What makes predicting this stuff so hard, even with so many parties jockeying to get information out there? Here are a few reasons.

Best player available: Many teams (I think the Steelers are one) are welded to the idea that you draft the best player available at all times. These days, you can find dozens of reports on what teams need what, but for certain teams, you can throw that out. Unless you have first-hand access to their boards, you can’t know who they’ll draft. That’s all there is to it.

Top 30 visits don’t matter as much as you might think: The way things have developed, T-30 visits are kind of the catch-all for players a team thinks it might draft that didn’t go to the combine. With the new rules that have expanded the geographical area for local pro days, lots of teams can now have projected first-rounders in without having to burn a Top 30 visit. For example, the Bears worked out Notre Dame QB DeShone Kizer as part of their local pro day. Bottom line, I won’t call T-30 visits plentiful, but I get the sense that teams are starting to use them almost to eliminate a player (and create false interest) rather than to get that up-close look they have to have before drafting them.

Opinions change: I’ve spoken to scouts who had great interest in a player at an all-star game, but subsequently lost interest in the player for any number of reasons. More often than not, no one tells the player or his agent. It doesn’t matter how many times a kid is interviewed at the Shrine Game or the NFLPA Collegiate Bowl. If that interest doesn’t continue throughout February, March and into April, you can forget about that all-star heat.

Good ‘ol subterfuge: I think this happens a lot less than it used to. In the old days, I think team executives and scouts were more adversarial with the media than they are now. The Internet has changed how much information, good and bad, is out there, and  it just makes more sense for scouts and directors to have the local writers and TV personalities on their dance card, so they don’t outright lie as much. Still, there are plenty of times members of the media (especially those that are from out of town, or who are new) are led to believe the wrong thing, or are not told the whole story (or are just plain ol’ lied to). After all, the draft is a huge card game. If a team can throw others off its scent with a false story, that’s a big win this close to the draft.

New Agent Primer: The ‘Knowing Scouts’ Dilemma

10 Friday Mar 2017

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If you’ve been reading my blog the past two weeks, you know I’ve already broken a lot of ground on this topic (here and here), but let me dig a little deeper into this issue.

The one question I get the most often from new agents is, how do I get to know and build trust with scouts? How do I get to a point where a scout will give me honest feedback on a player I’m recruiting, and perhaps even recommend sleepers? If I could answer this question, I’d probably not be handing it out on a blog.

It’s a Catch-22 situation that all goes back to the ‘quid pro quo’ nature of the business. As an agent, until you have clients that interest scouts, they don’t particularly want to know you. Once you do have clients of some worth, they will be more interested, but in direct proportion to the ability of your client. In other words, the big firms get the big players, and therefore have the deep and long-lasting relationship with NFL power brokers that ensure their continued success.

So how do you get around this? We’re trying different ways of doing that. Last year, we helped five agencies contract with former NFL scouts, and while we won’t have results for about a month-and-a-half, all the agents I’ve spoken to about the program were especially satisfied. In December, we referred interested agents to a former NFL scouting executive who gave them a professional, insightful report on any player they wanted to know about, and it was very reasonably priced. We’re working on some other options for agents as they recruit the 2018 class and I think they’ll be helpful, too. But the bottom line is that, unless you’re connected to a top prospect or you’re a former NFL scout yourself, you’re going to have to figure out the players that have the best chance on your own during your first go-round. We offer several ways to find those players, but there’s no avoiding a sense of risk. The key is managing that risk and not letting it choke you.

If you’re in that big group with no ties to scouts or executives, here’s the good news: often, scouts don’t know the answers, either. Even though they’re out on the road, checking their sources and watching film, they get things wrong all the time. I have several stories from personal experience running all-star games and trying to build a roster that scouts had signed off on that prove this. You might find players that you think can play, and you may be right.

Now, here’s the bad news: it doesn’t matter what you think. Obviously, their opinions are the ones that matter. There’s a good deal of groupthink when it comes to scouting and evaluation, and you might find a player that checks all the boxes, but for some reason just doesn’t ring the chimes with many (or any) teams. In this case, you will have to decide if you want to trust yourself, or if you want to find someone you might not like as much, but that NFL teams seem to prefer.

It’s a conundrum, a truly difficult situation. But if you’re going to pursue NFLPA certification, you need to be prepared for it.

Next week, we’ll talk about the draft and a new agent’s odds of hearing his client’s name called during the seven rounds of picks. See you then.

A Beginner’s Guide to Working the NFL Combine

17 Friday Feb 2017

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Every year I talk to people looking to break into the NFL as an agent, scout, financial advisor or even player, and very often, their plan is to start with the combine (yes, several years I’ve seen ex-college stars trying to give their resumes to scouts and writers in Indianapolis).

Look, I get it. Nowhere else can you find every scout, every coach, and every top NFL prospect in one city at the same time. Not at the Senior Bowl, and certainly not at the NFL draft. In addition, Indianapolis is pretty easy to navigate. Unlike my home city of Houston, you don’t need a car once you get downtown. Pretty much everything is within walking distance, and if you know the walkways, you never even have to go outside.

If you’re an aspiring member of the football business who’s headed to Indy in two weeks, here are a few do’s and don’ts.

  • If you’re a financial advisor headed to Indy, hoping to hit up as many top players as you can talk to, curb your enthusiasm. Players are in town for four days, not a day more, and while they’re in town, almost every minute is scheduled. In fact, players are assigned to groups with a scout who takes them around; it’s almost like they have a chaperone. In addition, all players stay at the Crown Plaza Downtown Union Station, and it might as well be Fort Knox. Twenty years ago, the lobby at the Crown was the nerve center, the place where writers, agents, and even scouts hung out. These days, take as much as a step inside the lobby without the proper credentials and security tackles you.
  • I spoke to a young man today who will be taking the agent exam this summer, and he’s headed to Indy to meet as many scouts as he can. I have a lot of respect for someone who’s spending his own money with no agenda but to try to make ‘cold’ introductions to scouts. This is also a tough proposition. Most scouts don’t want to know an agent unless he’s got a player that interests them. Until then, these agents are just someone else clogging their inbox or handing out business cards. I’m going to try to help this young man, but I’ve tried to keep his expectations reasonable.
  • It helps to have a sense of ‘place’ when you’re at the combine. For NFL scouts and personnel, obviously, it’s everything going on at Lucas Oil Stadium, and for the media, it’s the interview room at the Convention Center, with players and executives streaming through regularly. For agents, there’s the NFLPA seminar all day on Thursday. Even selected fans will have something to do this year with Indianapolis turned into a Super Bowl-style hive of NFL entertainment and activity. But if you’re someone looking to make connections, it’s a little tougher. That’s one reason we at ITL have held a seminar for seven years. We’ve hosted a number of ex-NFL GMs and scouts, as well as key members of the NFL draft media. This year, for our eighth event, we’ll have former NFL scout Matt Manocherian, who’s now with Sports Info Solutions. He’ll give an insider’s look at how analytics are being used by NFL teams. String that together with a happy hour sponsored by one of our partners and a few other lunches open to people in the agent business, and it gives you something to do. But you kind of have to know where to go and what to do.
  • If you don’t fit into any of these categories, I always recommend The Omni as a place to people-watch and maybe meet a few key people. Lunch is good at The Ram, which has big, enclosed booths that can hold 6-8 people; it’s almost like having your own mini-meeting room. After dinner hours, you can find scouts and executives at St. Elmo’s, Shula’s, and High Velocity, the tony bar at the J.W. Marriott.

Week 3: A Final Road Roundup

27 Friday Jan 2017

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I came off the road this week after spending Sunday through Wednesday in Lower Alabama for the Senior Bowl, one of the best weeks of the year if you’re in the football profession. It’s football with a side of Mardi Gras in a friendly town reminiscent of New Orleans.

Here are a few thoughts from the road.

  • Most bizarre/sadly funny/semi-tragic plane flight story of the week comes from Jeff Jankovich, an agent I’ve profiled in this space before. Jeff took off from Reagan Airport on Monday morning. About 10 minutes into the flight, the pilot comes over the intercom to say that there’s a mechanical issue and they’ll have to land. That’s the bad news. The really bad news is that they had too much fuel, so they had to circle for two hours before it was safe to put down. Of course, they landed not back at Reagan, but at Dulles. By the time Jeff had deplaned; traveled an hour-and-a-half (through traffic, by bus) from Reagan back to Dulles; then waited in line to be re-ticketed, it was 3 p.m. and there were no more flights to New Orleans. His best option was to go home, then take an early flight the next day to Atlanta, rent a car and drive (about five hours from Mobile; New Orleans is about two). It was not a banner day for American Airlines. Incidentally, big congrats to Jeff for having his first Senior Bowl invitee, West Virginia OC Tyler Orlosky.
  • We all know the expression ‘it’s a small world.’ It came to life for me this week as I sat and watched North Carolina receiver Ryan Switzer catch passes and run routes as a member of the North squad. Ryan’s dad, Mike, was a senior offensive lineman at St. Albans High School, about 20 minutes south of Charleston, W.Va., when I was a sophomore. In 1985, we’re two guys on the practice field in a small town in southern West Virginia. More than 30 years later, we’re two guys at Ladd-Peebles Stadium congratulating each other on making it to Mobile, though in completely different ways. Weird, and kinda cool.
  • I love going to practices because it’s one of the best chances I get to see and say hi to clients and friends. The only drawback is, because I’m there, I always get asked who’s looking good out there. First of all, I’m so engrossed with catching up with friends that I rarely get a glimpse of the field.  But second — and I know this pretty much goes against everything you’re going to read over the next four months — I just don’t know how much all the hubbub about who’s having a great week and who’s not really matters. Scouting is just entirely too subjective, and most of what you read online about whose ‘stock’ is soaring or falling is really questionable. I’ve been coming to these games so long that I can remember several players that ascended after a strong week (North Carolina DT Ryan Sims in 2002, California QB Kyle Boller in 2003, Arkansas’ Matt Jones in 2005 and Louisville DT Amobi Okoye in 2007 are just a few), then went out and had nondescript NFL careers. I’m sure you could name players that had awesome weeks, then went on to football stardom (Oregon State’s Chad Johnson in 2001 was one), but I just don’t see a strong correlation anymore. That makes it hard to really get excited about what happens here. There are just too many variables, too many unknowns. I know that’s not sexy and not really connected to what you find on the Web these days, but I believe it’s true.
  • In keeping with that theme, I’m pretty excited about our coming ITL Combine Seminar set for Wednesday, March 1, at 7 p.m. We’re going to have former Saints and Browns scout Matt Manocherian speak, but not really because he’s a former NFL evaluator. Instead, it’s because he’s now with Sports Info Solutions, a firm that Bill James founded to develop the analytics ideas that have taken hold in baseball (and been featured in Moneyball). I’m not sure analytics translates to football the way it does baseball — just too messy, too much integration between players — but I’m willing to listen with an open mind. I look forward to them discussing how their methods apply to football.

Week 2: More Sights, Sounds and Notes from the Road

20 Friday Jan 2017

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It was another week on the road for me with two all-star games, the Tropical Bowl (played in Daytona Beach) and the Shrine Game (St. Petersburg) played in Florida. Here are a few things I thought interesting from this week.

  • I got to tour IMG Academy in Bradenton on Tuesday. In many ways it gave me a chance to see the future of athletics; it was an unbelievable place. You might have seen my tweet, which included an attempt at a panoramic shot of the place. The picture doesn’t do the place justice anyway. By next year, it will include 700 acres of  fields, stadiums, classrooms, parking lots, auditoriums, cafeterias, scenic ponds and lakes, weight rooms, roads, pathways and green space. Yes, even with all of this, there’s plenty of green space, in addition to hundreds of students from literally all over the world dressed from head to toe in IMG-logoed, Under Armour attire.
  • There are two things I’ll remember most. One, when a draft prospect arrives, the first thing IMG officials do is test his sweat to measure the electrolytes he loses. Then they design a concoction at the Gatorade Sports Science Institute (which is right there on the grounds, one of three in the world) and voila! He’s got his own specific Gatorade blend, and it’s available whenever he wants it. That’s pretty cool. The other thing was that IMG has developed a combine — for e-sports. Yes, the good people at IMG have even figured out a way to make money off the nerds who aspire to go from their mother’s couch to a stadium somewhere, where other nerds will pay money to watch them play video games.
  • One thing I always hear from scouts is how disappointed they are in the lack of talent at the various all-star games. The older scouts, especially, lament the fact that fewer stars play in the Senior Bowl, Shrine Game and lesser games. There’s a good reason for that — most of those would-be seniors are already in the NFL — but the fact remains that some of these games have grown a little stale. That’s why it was so refreshing this year to see the Shrine Game involving assistant coaches from  all over the NFL as the assistants for this week’s game. It brought a new energy to this week’s workouts.
  • Here’s another big plus: referees were on site to throw flags during the team portions of the drills. It made everyone sharper and gave every workout a game-like intensity. This was one of the better Shrine weeks in recent memory.
  • One longtime friend told several stories about former Miami (Fla.), Oklahoma, Louisville and Florida Atlantic head coach Howard Schnellenberger, who has also coached several all-star games. As the story was told, Schnellenberger was not so adept when it comes to pop culture, especially the music scene. One time, he proudly announced to his coaches that “one of the hottest band in music” would be playing at the stadium at a future date. The band? “Trickshot!” he proudly exclaimed. When he got blank stares from his staff, he excoriated them for living closed, uncultured lives. “You guys gotta get out more and live life,” he urged them. Of course, the blank stares were warranted, as the band was really Cheap Trick.
  • Another time, the Rolling Stones were playing Louisville’s football stadium, and shortly before the show, Schnellenberger found a member of the band’s entourage checking out the school’s trophy case. “Hold it! Hold it! Hold it!,” said the coach with outstretched arms. “If you’re with the band, back in the visitors locker room!” When the band member obliged, another coach chided him with, “Coach, do you know who that was?” When Schnellenberger was told it was Mick Jagger, he responded with, “well, he didn’t know who I was.”

Notes From The Road

13 Friday Jan 2017

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Every year, when I travel to all-star games, I get to talk to the people that make up the business. Scouts, agents, financial planners, trainers, players and their parents — they all have different perspectives on the game. That’s part of what makes football so fascinating.

Here are a few things I found of interest this week:

  • I had a long talk with a scout who’s been in the game for more than 30 years. In the course of our talks on the business of player evaluation, he talked about how busy he is from August to November, and how, even when he’s home on the weekends, he’s mainly finishing up reports. He told me the secret to driving four hours after a full day of work (without falling asleep) is to adjust your seat so the backrest is at a right angle to the seat. It’s not so comfortable, but it keeps you alert. Makes sense to me.
  • He also said his ‘laundromat’ during a two-week trip is usually the hotel sink. So let’s see: 12-hour days followed by four-hour drives; washing your undies in the sink; and staying so sleepy that you have to drive bolt upright in your seat. Still want to be a scout?
  • One school that takes agent registration, prospect education, and the selection process very seriously threatened to bar one of its players from its pro day when he signed with a contract advisor who’s not registered with the school. I’m not sure if I’m in favor of that, but I do know that if all schools had that policy, and followed through with it, the recruiting process would be a lot more orderly.
  • I’ve always been a guy who believes teams should cover every all-star game of every stripe, no matter how low on the food chain. They should also make sure they’re keeping tabs on all the other leagues, like the CFL, Arena League, etc. However, I had an interesting conversation with a scout this week who disagreed. He looks at a scouting department as a tablecloth that’s a little too small. You have to make sure the biggest part of the tablecloth  is covering the key parts of the ‘table’ (mainly the FBS teams and the better FCS teams), and accept that there may be a few crumbs left here and there. You have to play the odds, basically. Even when you’re an NFL team with 10-12 area scouts. There’s just too many players.
  • We had one more (friendly) disagreement. He likes the idea of the Pacific Pro Football League, and thinks it will attract a number of talented players that have no interest in attending school and who are willing to spend their three post-high school, pre-NFL eligibility years making $50,000 per year. My feeling is that most players worth considering for such a league will still see colleges as their best path to NFL riches, even if it means they’re essentially indentured servants for three years.

Those are the highlights from Week 1. More next week.

Questions of the Season

30 Friday Dec 2016

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The 60 days from about Thanksgiving to the Senior Bowl are the busiest ‘behind the scenes’ times of the football business, or at least, they are for me and most ITL clients. It’s also when I spend most of my time on the road, hopping from all-star game to all-star game.

It’s a wild and crazy time when my wife and kids rarely see me, but it’s also the time when I get to see ‘my people,’ face to face. When you run a business like mine, you spend hours texting, emailing and talking on the phone with people, but you never see their faces unless it’s on a Facebook post. There’s still value in meeting with people, shaking hands, and talking shop.

Of course, there’s very little time to waste, so I try not to spend a lot of time on small talk. Here are a few questions I’ll be asking my contacts and colleagues over the next few weeks.

Three percent? 1.5 percent? Something else?: As you know, if you read this blog, we’ve spent a lot of time on the new SRA, which defaults to a 1.5 percent agent fee unless otherwise marked. There was a pretty high level of interest (and worry) on the part of agents when the NFLPA released the new SRA with these standards set. Were these worries warranted? Are players willing to pay 3 percent? Are they demanding training be paid in return for paying 3 percent? Do they even have any idea about the 3 percent vs. 1.5 percent issue?

How small is too small? What off-the-field matter makes a player too hot to touch?: I’m not sure anyone can answer these questions, but 14 years after launching ITL, I’m still asking them. What makes one player with high production but size limitations a first-rounder, but another with almost exactly the same production and dimensions undraftable? I started a text conversation with an ex-NFL player a few weeks back regarding this question, and it got so detailed that I asked him to postpone it, with hopes that we’ll have time to expand on it at the combine or somewhere else on the all-star trail. Maybe the truth is out there. Ultimately, I think the answer lies in what’s ‘safe’ and defensible in scouting circles. My guess is that it’s got a lot to do with the media, and how much criticism a team will get or not get if it violates the scouting ‘book.’ Could the media and public perception really have that kind of impact on player evaluation? if so, it means analytics deserve much wider use in football circles, at least to me. But I don’t want to fall back on convenient solutions if there’s something concrete that I’m missing.

Anyway, if these questions interest you, I’ll be on a fact-finding mission over the next month-plus, and I’ll try to bring my findings back to this space. I hope you’ll check it out. And if you have your own ideas on these topics, please, fill me in via the comments section.