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.

Early in March, we started tracking the post-combine mock drafts of the seven services we’ve been following for two years now. Then the coronavirus happened, and all our efforts went into trying to fill the pro day gap.

This week, we’re trotting our grid back out, dusting it off and giving it a look. Next week, we’ll look at the last round of mocks (by the same services) for the last time before NFL teams do it for real the last weekend of the month.

Here’s what we found in this month’s mocks.

• This is something we’ll be watching more closely going forward, but one trend we detected was a great level of similarity between mock drafts (OK, we weren’t surprised that much, either, but still). Every one of the seven services we surveyed in their first mock draft of March had LSU’s Joe Burrow No. 1 overall. Six of seven had Ohio State’s Chase Young at No. 2 (hello, PFF). Four other players received the same top-10 grades from at least four of the services, including Clemson’s Isaiah Simmons (Tony Pauline, Matt Miller of Bleacher Report, ESPN’s Todd McShay and Sports Illustrated all at No. 4); Auburn’s Derrick Brown (Pauline, Miller, McShay and Walter Football have him at No. 7); Iowa’s Tristan Wirfs (Pauline, PFF, Brugler and Sports Illustrated at 8); and Alabama’s Jedrick Wills (No. 10 according to Pauline, PFF, Brugler and McShay).
• Georgia’s Andrew Thomas at 11 (Pauline, PFF, Brugler, Miller and Walter); Alabama’s Jerry Jeudy at 12 (according to PFF, Miller, Sports Illustrated and Walter); Alabama’s Henry Ruggs III at 15 (PFF, Brugler, McShay and Walter) have also drawn some sort of consensus.
• For what it’s worth, three services have been on the “Burrow is No. 1” express since October: PFF, Sports Illustrated and Walter. McShay was one of the early adopters, too, but got off the train in December (Young) before re-boarding pre-combine.
• If you’re looking for a draft expert who most closely resembles an analytics model, look to Brugler, who has 12 picks (1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 19, 22 and 29) in common with Pro Football Focus. I should note that there was a pretty major “clustering” among the draft experts post-combine, and I presume that if I reviewed last year’s totals, we’d see the same thing.
• Overall, we saw a “narrowing” of the board among the seven services, with 20 players on all seven services’ top 32. Just missing were Alabama FS Xavier McKinney (snubbed only by Pauline) and Oklahoma OB Kenneth Murray (not rated by McShay).
• Also, only three players (Wisconsin OB Zach Baun and OC Tyler Biadasz; Oregon OG Shane Lemieux; Alabama DT Raekwon Davis; Dugger and Gallimore) were on only one board. Baun was 30 by Brugler; Biadasz 31 and Lemieux 27 per Walter Football; Pauline listed Davis at 23; Dugger was 28 on the PFF mock; and Gallimore was 25 according to Sports Illustrated).
• New entries to mock drafts were Clemson DC A.J. Terrell (No. 20 according to Miller, 27 for PFF, 32 for Brugler); Boise St. OT Ezra Cleveland (No. 29 per PFF and Brugler, 31 on Pauline’s board); Lenoir-Rhyne SS Kyle Dugger (No. 28 according to PFF) and Oklahoma DT Neville Gallimore (No. 25 to Sports Illustrated).

We’ve given the services a more extensive look in today’s Friday Wrap, which comes out this evening (6:30 p.m. CT). As always, you can register for it here.

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.

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.

As you know, we like to take periodic looks at some of the bigger-name draft personalities at key points in the draft process. With the NFL Combine next week, we thought this would be a good time to take measure of their latest work.

We have stayed with the same seven mocks we’ve surveyed since we started — Pro Football Network/Tony Pauline; Pro Football Focus; Sports Illustrated; Bleacher Report/Matt Miller; ESPN/Todd McShay; The Athletic/Dane Brugler; and Walter Football). It’s worth noting that the most recent mock from Pauline that we could find was pre-Senior Bowl, so it’s a little dated. All the other mocks have taken place in February.

And away we go.

• Twenty-one players who were rated by at least one service as a first-rounder during our last survey no longer carry such a grade by any of the seven mocks. They are Stanford DC Paulson Adebo; Missouri TE Albert Okwuegbunam, Oregon OB Troy Dye, Stanford OT Walker Little, Georgia OG Solomon Kindley, Florida DE Jon Greenard, Alabama OT Alex Leatherwood, Florida St. DT Marvin Wilson, Alabama OB Dylan Moses, Texas OT Sam Cosmi, Boise St. DE Curtis Weaver, Alabama WO Devonta Smith, Ohio State DC Shaun Wade, Michigan WO Donovan Peoples–Jones, Purdue TE Brycen Hopkins, Virginia DC Bryce Hall, Clemson OH Travis Etienne, California FS Ashtyn Davis, Georgia OT Isaiah Wilson, UCF WO Gabe Davis and Auburn OT Prince Tega Wanogho. Obviously, several of them didn’t enter the draft (Adebo, Little, Leatherwood, Moses, Cosmi, Smith, Wade, Etienne and Marvin Wilson) but others apparently aren’t as buzz-worthy as they once were, at least with mock draft analysts.
• The real movement appears to be at wide receiver. Our last snapshot of mock drafts  had Alabama’s Jerry Jeudy, Oklahoma’s CeeDee Lamb and Colorado’s Laviska Shenault on every one, in that order. Today, that order still holds, but primarily because Pauline had him a 6 in January. He’s at 12, on average, based on the other, more recent, mocks. However, Lamb is closing the gap quickly and two mocks (Brugler and Sports Illustrated’s Kevin Hanson) even have Lamb going first (Brugler has Lamb 12 and Jeudy 13, while Hanson sees it as 9 vs. 13).
• Also of note: only Brugler (at 23) had Louisville OT Mekhi Becton in the first round in December. Now, only Pauline doesn’t have him as a top-11 pick (which probably changes in Pauline’s next mock). Brugler has him at 7.

For more analysis of these seven top mock drafts, make sure to register for our Friday Wrap, where we’ll go much deeper. You can do that here. It comes out every Friday evening at 6:30 p.m. CT.

Also of note: on Wednesday, we’ll be honoring The Athletic’s Ben Standig for having the top mock draft last year as graded by The Huddle Report, which tracked more than 100 mocks — including all of the seven we’ve tracked here — that were filed shortly before the actual draft last April. Sports Illustrated’s Kevin Hanson is a previous Huddle Report champion.

At any rate, Ben will be on hand at the 2020 TEST Football Academy ITL Combine Seminar, our 11th such event and the place to be if you’re interested in networking with people in the football community. You can find more details here, and if you’re an ITL client, you’re invited. See you there!

The XFL’s opening weekend was a smashing success, both from a broadcast standpoint as well as attendance, and it has the full attention of those in the football business community. Still, there’s a facet to the excitement that I think many are missing.

What do Bears Assistant Director of Player Personnel Champ Kelly (indoor football GM), Browns area scout Gerald McCully (CFL scout), Tampa Bay scouting coordinator Cesar Rivera (AFL scout), Chiefs national scout Cassidy Kaminski (scouted for an Australian team), Colts NFS scout Mike Lacy (AFL scout) and many other NFL evaluators have in common? They all got their start in alternative leagues. The XFL has a long way to go before it shows the staying power of the CFL (or even the now-defunct Arena Football League), but the early returns are promising.

This is great news for aspiring NFL scouts. While the best routes into scouting remain working in college personnel or, even better, having a father who’s in the NFL, there’s an opportunity here. However, you have to know how to take advantage. Here’s what I recommend.

• Reach out: Daryl Johnston and Bob Morris (Dallas), Blake Beddingfield and Randy Mueller (Houston), Trip MacCracken (New York), Jeff Bauer (St. Louis) and Tony Softli (Seattle) are all XFL (and former NFL) scouts and evaluators on Twitter. Most of them are also my friends, and I can attest to them being good people. If you reach out to them with the right attitude, you’ve got a great shot at making contact. God knows they have plenty on their plate and could probably use some help. But first . . . .
• Make it clear you’ll do anything: Every XFL team has a bare-bones evaluation staff, and that’s by design; the league has made an affirmative decision to reduce costs by centralizing evaluation. Still, these teams are playing to win and they need help sorting out the good players from the bad. But first, you have to prove that you are hard-working and reliable. That means you might have to run errands, load and unload, make copies, bring coffee, whatever. Make it clear you are elated to do this.
• Don’t send scouting reports: Believe me, I get it. You want to show your passion for football. You want to show that you are fluent in the game. All those things are important. Still, the first thing most aspiring scouts want to send is a resume and scouting reports, and the last thing most scouts I know want is same. You need to impress upon them your willingness to do anything before you assert your eye for talent.
• Be there: This is the one thing that is most often overlooked. If you already live in an XFL city, you have a huge advantage over everyone else. The same is true if you’re trying to volunteer with virtually any team in any league. Maybe it was Woody Allen who said, “showing up is 80 percent of success. Maybe it wasn’t. It’s still true.

Do all these things and maybe you’re the next Will McClay, Vice President of Player Personnel for the Cowboys. Back in 2001, he was Director of Player Personnel of the XFL’s Orlando Rage.

Want more ideas on how to break into the NFL? It starts with knowing what’s going on behind the scenes. You can get a really good handle on that by reading our Friday Wrap, which comes out this afternoon. You can register for it here.