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.”

For War Story Thursday (since we missed Wednesday), a brief story about draft info and where it comes from (and why).

In the days before Inside the League in the early ’00s, I was able to befriend an NFL GM, and we spoke occasionally. He was amazingly forthright and always spoke openly, which I appreciated. At the time (as now), I was thoroughly interested in how information flowed through the league. Why would an NFL scout risk his highly coveted, hard-to-replace job to tell a beat writer who the team liked in the middle rounds, or even in the early rounds? The GM was succinct.

“I spent some time in the media doing broadcast work between jobs, and I saw that media-friendly GMs and scouting directors always got friendly treatment in return,” he said, as I recall. “It’s a quid pro quo relationship. If you give a reporter good inside scoop, he’ll take care of you when times are tough.”

He added that, most of the time, information that’s coming from the bigger media personalities and better-known ‘draft gurus’ was coming from director types, not road scouts. Directors were the ones that benefited from media exposure and the ones who regularly dealt with beat writers.

In succeeding years, it was fascinating to watch him live this out. This GM became one of the most media-friendly, if not the most media-friendly, NFL officials in the game. I knew a writer who tells a story about being on the golf course when the GM’s team signed its first-rounder, and he got a ring on his cell phone. It was the GM, and while the writer stood on the 15th hole, the GM spelled out in detail the terms of the contract while my friend scribbled madly on his score card. This was an unsolicited call, mind you. That’s a GM who’s eager to stay on writers’ good sides.

I got another dose of reality today when I was chatting with a longtime member of the scouting community who’s now between jobs. During our conversation, he mentioned a current NFL head coach and how much he respected his work ethic and smarts before his voice trailed off. I could tell there were things he’d left unsaid, so I asked him what he didn’t like about the coach.

“He thinks about his career first,” he said. “He’s always talking to the media. That’s why he has his job now, why he got a head coaching position. He’d been feeding the media for years and it paid off.”

I could tell you dozens more stories in this vein, from how agents control information release to how NFL officials have benefited from cozy relationships with people on the representation or media side.

The media can be a fickle beast. Writers will turn on you in an instant if the wind changes direction. Still, if you apply your instincts to the information you read and track it back to who benefits from its release, you can usually figure out where it came from. That’s one of the most important traits you can have as a member of the business. If you don’t already think about where draft info comes from when you read it, change how you read. It will serve you well in your career.