In this space, I try to encourage people who want a place in football to go their own way, and to find their own route to success. I was talking to a couple friends in football over the past week, one a scout and one who runs all-star games, and they each discussed an idea I’ve always thought about: basically, it’s a combine with pads.

Most folks who run all-star games are football guys. They aren’t TV people and they aren’t ticket sales experts, but they have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to broadcast the games (that’s right — they PAY for air time rather than receiving money for broadcast rights) and hope they get 5,000-6,000 fans at the gate (which is about right for most all-star games). What they’d like to focus on, usually, is compiling a talented roster of players and some good coaches, then making sure NFL teams have all the information they need.

So what if they could just focus on their areas of expertise? What if there was a week of practice without a game? What if a game could run full-contact workouts that were more than just the 90-minute exercises, often not even in pads, that you see at all-star games?

What if you brought in the top 330 or so players and ran them through workouts on three adjacent fields? You started on Monday, had weigh-ins and covered plays, then turned the players loose for three days of head-to-head action? If the league got on board with it, this model could revolutionize the game, giving players more time to prepare for their pro day and potentially eliminating the need for a combine, or at least reducing its importance.

There are a couple of holdups. No. 1 is money, of course. The NFL is always reluctant to open its wallet, especially when there’s a reasonably good facsimile of an idea already in place (minor league football, anyone?). The other hurdle is that the league hates change. People from all walks of football have told me this, and it’s the only reason in the world why teams essentially conduct 32 different scouting operations rather than centralizing the obvious things like weigh-ins (for instance, why do 32 teams’ scouts sit in one room, writing down heights and weights with pencil and paper, when one intern could do it for all of them?).

So, there are always holdups, but there’s an idea, ready to go and on the house. Would it be an easy sell? Of course not. But I feel, and others I talk to feel, that it’s an idea whose time has come.

After a few conversations with scouts, here are a couple of observations about the business and how, perhaps, to land a position in scouting and, once you’ve got it, how to keep it.

• One scout told me the biggest part of his job is getting a GM, head coach or other superior to see what he’s seen and likes. In other words, when the scouting staff is watching film, it’s important the team sees film of a prospect not when he’s hurt, but when he’s healthy. If a team looks at a player when he’s coming off an ankle injury, or has a bum shoulder, or whatever, the opinion of his ability will be very different from when he was at full strength. This scout takes a personal interest in seeing that such film is what goes on the screen. I know of another scout who got a player drafted because he went back to the player’s junior-year film, when the young man was playing his best position, rather than focusing solely on what the player was doing as a senior. That scout received a promotion this year, and it was well-deserved. That’s way more than just doing the minimum. You’ve got to make sure the player is seen in his best light. That’s how you find stars that are off other teams’ radars.
• In talking to agents, I hear a lot about how a player’s off-field issues don’t matter or at least don’t matter as much. In speaking to a scout recently, he made it clear off-field is as important as on. It’s because getting to class, getting to meetings on time, taking the steps to stay healthy, learning the playbook, being where you’re supposed to be, and everything else ‘outside the lines’ is what keeps you successful inside them. It shows maturity and a successful personality. Coaches in the NFL lack the bandwidth to be on a kid all day every day just to make sure he does what he’s supposed to.
• I know of a scout who’s looking for a helper, an assistant, and he said he’s made a point of looking for someone who has paid his dues, working for free at times and changing places (jobs, schools) in his campaign to get to the NFL. “That guy isn’t going to expect anything to be handed to him,” my friend said. “He will know that he must work hard without me telling him.”
• Believe it or not, scouts are not given carte blanche by some agents, and certainly by many college teams. I heard today of an agent who told a high-level scout he couldn’t have access to a draft-eligible player. “Tell me what you want and I’ll get it from him,” this agent told the scout. It’s no surprise his client went undrafted despite being among the top prospects at his position. If you represent a player, do everything possible to satisfy requests made by NFL teams. Don’t do anything to have your client taken off the board, as this agent’s client was.

I got a phone call from a friend on Wednesday. Before he would go forward with the call, he made me promise I wouldn’t disclose where he got the information he was about to tell me. That’s not unusual, and I gave my word.

As you know if you read this blog regularly, this is the time of year when scouts get fired. Despite what some people claim on Twitter, it’s not a knee-jerk reaction to some missed picks on draft weekend. In most cases, these changes were planned months ago, when there was a shift in power due to a new GM, a newly empowered head coach, a team looking to cut back, or whatever.

Anyway, my friend told me one of the 15-20 scouts who’s been shuffled out the door in the last couple weeks has a serious medical condition. It’s a brain tumor, in fact. I don’t have any details — I don’t know if it’s operable, or whether or not the scout has a contract that will pay him for another year(s) with attendant health insurance. All I know is that it’s a man with a family and serious medical questions clouding his future. My friend was beside himself.

“I mean, they knew he had a brain tumor,” he said. “They let him go anyway. It would have been so much easier to say, ‘we’re going to make a change, but we’re going to work this out.’ But they didn’t do that.”

My friend then told me I could do what I want with the information. I gotta say, I don’t quite know what to do.

First off, I don’t know the scout, and given that this is pretty sensitive information, I’m just not sure that it would be right to expose this. If we’re talking about a situation that can be handled quietly, it’s probably better to leave it alone. If it becomes widely known that he’s suffering with this condition, it probably makes him unemployable.

On the other hand, a team that would do something like this, well, it probably deserves to be exposed. But that’s hard to do given that I have one source on this, and really lack the fundamentals of the story. Without the team’s side of things, it’s hard to pick on them. What if they did take care of him? What if my friend lacks some key details?

So I’m in a bit of a quandary, but for what it’s worth, I don’t doubt what I was told. Scouts are generally seen as disposable. It’s a business, pure and simple, and just one more reason to choose wisely if you’re considering evaluation as your career path.

On Twitter, there’s been a lot of attention to some of the teams that are making scouting changes this week. It’s a pretty normal, seasonal thing, and not a reaction to what happened last weekend.

To give an example, this is our grid from last year showing the various behind-the-scenes changes that took place in scouting departments across the league. It was actually a pretty normal year, nothing like the 2012 offseason when about double the number of changes took place.

Anyway, here’s the list from last year. If you’d like to see the complete changes from 2013, click here, and for 2012, click here (warning, they’re pay links):

One thing that always fascinates me about the NFL is that, well, there are a lot of inefficiencies when it comes to player evaluation. Everyone takes a slightly different road to get to the same place, but because no one knows exactly what others are doing, it’s very hard to measure which methods are successful and which aren’t.

This is especially true of the post-draft undrafted free agency signing chase. This topic is one I’ve been studying over the past week, trying to find a consensus on how teams do things. Only problem is that there doesn’t seem to be one.

Take the selection and signing process. Several former scouts I talked to said their teams tended to use their position coaches to ‘close’ players, so I thought I’d found a common thread. With that in mind, I sent this text to Jon Kingdon, former Director of College Scouting for the Raiders, and Miller McCalmon, who was an area scout for the Redskins and Texans and headed the Lions’ pro department: “When you were going through the undrafted free agent process, were your area scouts focused on players from their areas, that they had scouted, and trying to get them signed, or were they assigned a position they had to fill, like OL or QBs or whatever?”

Jon’s response: “All this was discussed ahead of time. We liked to use the people that had historically done contracts that personally knew the agents who represented the specific players. If we did use a scout to negotiate with an agent, we would try and use the scout who wrote up the player so he could speak knowledgeably about the player to the agent which would make the agent perceive this as a greater interest in his player.”

Translation: The Raiders liked to go through the agent, leveraging the team’s cap guy’s relationship (or future relationship) with that agent. However, if the scout could speak so credibly about the player that it might sway the agent, then they’d go that route. Interesting.

Here’s Miller’s response: “I have seen it done both ways! But a lot times the area scout knows the players in his area and possibly has a relationship with them, which helps in recruiting a player. That is what that process is, it is recruiting players for as little money as possible!”

Translation: Once again, whoever has the most perceived leverage with the player (or his agent) is the one charged with getting him on board. In Miller’s case, the teams he worked with seemed to lean on the scouts.

Given that there was no real consensus, I reached out to Matt Manocherian, who was the Browns’ Northeast area scout after spending several years with the Saints. He said the Saints, for example, assigned scouts to handle certain positions, but I found out the true ‘closers’ were the team’s big-name coaches.

“Usually the coaches can connect to the kid a little bit better,” he said. “Probably like twice a year (Saints head coach) Sean Payton was used as a closer. He would be like, ‘Don’t bother me,’ then ‘Oh, that kid? Let me talk to him!’ Also, (defensive coordinator) Rob Ryan with the Saints is great. He would trust the scouts, and he would give them a type of guy he wanted, and would trust the scouts to find that player, and he would be very willing to close. He was like, ‘Whoever you guys think the best players are, let’s go get them and let me know what I can do.’ ”

I guess, at the end of the day, a team is going to do whatever it can to get the job done. Maybe it’s equally as hard for teams to gather information and come to a consensus as it is for me.

I spent most of last week talking to some friends who were formerly in scouting, mostly about their experiences after the draft. As I’ve mentioned in this space before, I get overwhelmed by the day-to-day hype about Jameis, Marcus and the like, and it’s fun to me to learn more about the nuances of the draft that come with working in the game. So the post-draft frenzy to sign ‘scratch and dent’ players, hoping to find the Wayne Chrebet, James Harrison or Tony Romo in the bunch has a certain fascination to it.

Most teams don’t do things exactly the same when it comes to their focus on undrafted free agents, but these seem to be the common threads.

• Most teams identify the players they expect to slide through the draft and start calling them about two weeks before the draft takes place. In other words, they’re doing that right about now. My understanding is that they’re tactful but direct about their intentions: the players they’re calling are, by their evaluation, not draftees, but interesting nonetheless. Scouts have the difficult task of damning them to the nether regions of the draft, but expressing their sincere interest in them, hoping that their calls will flatter and not enrage. Based on what I wrote last week, it seems they bat about .500 on that.
• Once the draft starts, scouts begin their calls anew, usually around the start of the sixth round. Their pitch is very similar: ‘if you don’t get drafted (and there’s a great chance you will, but let’s say you don’t), we would love to have you, and we have a scarcity at your position and/or we’re old at your position, and you would be a perfect fit for our organization.’ Also, ‘we love undrafted free agents and you will compete on an even field with our draftees (which isn’t entirely true, of course, but they have to say that; the team that regularly cuts its draftees better have some awesome undrafted free agents to replace them).’
• Once the draft is over, you better make sure you don’t get off the phone without a deal, and that’s especially true if your client doesn’t play one of three impact positions: offensive tackle (not guard or center, just tackle); quarterback; or defensive end/linebacker, i.e., pass rusher. The four scouts I spoke to last week all had stories of how some agent eager to squeeze another grand out of a team said, ‘We’ll call you back.’ Well, as soon as those words were spilling out of the agent’s mouth, the scout was moving on. Very rarely is that offer still available when the agent comes back. Very often, the scout won’t even take the agent’s call. I realize that’s a bitter pill to swallow for an agent who’s spent thousands of dollars training a player, but it’s still true.
• Most scouts agreed that once the draft was over, it took them about two hours to sign the 10-12 players they were taking to camp with their draftees. After those two hours, the money’s pretty much spent and they’re just trying to fill in the cracks with leftovers. To me, that means agents need to set their watches and understand that once 120 minutes is up, you’re in scratch-and-claw-to-get-whatever-you-can territory.

I’m working on a big story for ITL clients next week that will go into minute detail on the undrafted free agent signing process. That’s about the last truly unexposed part of this business, in my opinion, and for the people I work with (as well as the true NFL junkies out there) it’s need-to-know information.

Anyway, before Monday, I will have interviewed five former NFL scouts. So far, I’ve spoken to two of them at length, and it confirms a couple things I’ve always suspected, but didn’t know for sure. Here are three common denominators I’ve noticed about the scouting process as it pertains to scouts and agents:

• All scouts are scared to death of the unknown: I remember once asking an NFL GM (the one I discussed earlier this week) if teams pay any attention to the draft guides and the websites.  He said yes, but only to a point. He said that all they cared about was making absolutely sure there wasn’t a name on any of the sites that the scouts hadn’t heard of. To some degree, player evaluation is a massive process of elimination. You want to make absolutely sure there’s not a guy out there that you haven’t at least decided can’t play.

• NFL teams are always looking for big guys. Always. This is from Jeff Bauer, who until December was Director of College Scouting for the Jets: “Usually offensive tackles are the toughest players to find. If there’s one position, offensive tackles can demand more (from their post-draft signing bonuses) than anybody else because everybody needs tackles for camp. But if (the agent for) a receiver is messing around with a signing bonus, (he) better be careful because there’s one just like (his client) out there.”

• Agents, like their clients, struggle with reality as it gets closer to the draft. The following comes from Jon Kingdon, until 2013 the Director of College Scouting for the Raiders: “You start calling the agents a week or two prior to the draft.  We would have someone call the agent for everyone we had ranked in the sixth and seventh round and ‘FA – YES’ grades.  He would express our interest in the player, getting as much information as he could from the agent.  He would confirm the phone numbers for the player and the agent and would then tell the agent that if the player does not get drafted, we would be interested in signing him as a free agent. Often the agent would be shocked that we would raise the possibility that his player might not get drafted, and they would tell us how much money they had invested in the player, and that they were sure his player was going in the first three rounds.  More often than not, their player would go undrafted.”