Tag Archives: NFL draft

Three Reasons Why This Is A Horrible Time to be NFL Draft-Eligible

20 Friday Mar 2020

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

If you’ve followed me on Twitter or read our content at Inside the League, you know I’ve been painting this coronavirus situation as especially dour for late-rounders. For those of you who don’t fully understand, let me explain myself.

Scouts are not going to have the access they usually have: One of the big benefits of pro days is that NFL teams gather reliable contact and agent information for literally thousands of players they might consider as undrafted free agents. The game plan to to fix this, as I wrote about here, is to call the colleges and ask them. This is a problem, however, because (a) a lot of NFL liaisons aren’t in the office these days and (b) most of them couldn’t tell you who represents their draft prospects. In all candor, most don’t seem to care and/or have other things they’d rather focus on. I can see lots of otherwise capable players falling through the cracks. But that’s not all the bad news.

Closing gyms is gonna have consequences: What if you were an agent? You spent around $10,000 per player to get him ready for his pro day, then just as he’s ready to go, half of the workouts are wiped out. Going on a three-mile run around the neighborhood does nothing to keep your starts crisp and your jumps explosive. If pro days do return, they won’t be back for at least two weeks. By then, some players won’t have trained for around a month. It’s almost like the money is down the drain.

No rookie mini-camps equals no tryout opportunities: Remember when Pete Carroll tried to pass on the goal line instead of giving it to Marshawn? The guy who swooped in for the pick, Malcolm Butler, was an ex-tryout player. In fact, we’ve told his story in this space. Dozens of players that go on to become reliable special-teamers, and sometimes even starters, began as guys who went to camp without a contract. Here are a few other names of ex-tryout players. Unless things change drastically (and quickly), rookie mini-camps will be a casualty of the coronavirus. If you’re a person who reads this space regularly, you know how that impacts the hopes of hundreds of NFL hopefuls this spring.

In the grand scheme of things, this is probably nothing, I know. But we don’t write about the grand scheme of things here at Inside the League. We focus on the business of the game, and there’s just no way to candycoat the obstacles so many players will face this year.

Read more about the strangest NFL draft season ever in this week’s Friday Wrap, which comes out at 6:30 p.m. CT. You can register for it here.

 

 

WSW: You Just Never Know

03 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by in Agents

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

As I’ve discussed previously in this space, I was on a panel last month at the Fowler School of Law at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. It was a fascinating time, to say the least, and a pleasure to hear some great minds talk about the business in a real, factual basis. So many times you wind up on a panel with people who think they know the business, but don’t. These folks did.

One of the stories that was told there I wanted to use for today’s Thursday edition of War Story Wednesday. The story is told by Sean Kiernan, a seasoned agent who’s based in the Los Angeles area. Though he’s with Select Sports Group now, the story he tells is from his time with Impact Sports, which is based in Boca Raton, Fla.

For what it’s worth, the five players he discussed below are taken from Impact’s draft class of Tennessee OG Arron Sears (2/35), Notre Dame DE Victor Abiamiri (2/57), Georgia DE Quentin Moses (3/65), California DC Daymeion Hughes (3/95), Oklahoma St. OG Corey Hilliard (6/209), Florida IB Brandon Siler (7/240). Apparently Sean didn’t recruit one of the players from this group.

“You look at it from a draft perspective, the best year we ever had as a company (at Impact Sports was in 2007. Erik and I were talking about it this morning. (All year) I was on the road between Atlanta and Phoenix, watching five guys, and I thought we had the best draft class ever. We ended up with two seconds, two thirds and a seventh, and I was at a company where we were consistently in the first round with at least one pick every year. None of those guys got second deals. None of them. One had concussion issues, was out of the league. One had a bad knee. Out of the league. One couldn’t run and played corner. Not a good thing. One, the top pick of the third round, got cut at the end of training camp. He was the highest guy to ever get cut in like four years, and he was the highest player on the BLESTO report and the third-highest player on the National report, eight months ago. And he got cut. Now, he survived four years in the league and he made it. We found the right place for him, but he never got a second deal. The seventh-round pick tore his Achilles going into his second deal. Five guys. And if you would have asked me, any year in my career, if I was to bet on any year of guys, that was the group of guys I would have bet on all day. All five of them, nothing. Then there’s guys I sign off of practice squad who get a four-year, $16 million deal. You just never know.”

I agree. This class looked like a lock going into the draft and even beyond, but it didn’t work out that way. If you get into this business, understand that it’s very fickle. There are no guarantees.

War Story Wednesday: NFL scouts edition

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

Since it’s WSW, we thought we’d pass along a few stories about NFL scouts that we thought illustrated the inexact nature of the business.

I think there’s a perception that the evaluation process is very scientific, dry and unerring. Nothing could be further from the truth. No matter how many scouts a team has on staff, and no matter how long they’ve been evaluating personnel, there’s a human element to it, and people make mistakes. They always will.

One example of this is the Bears, who in 1991 drafted running back Darren Lewis out of Texas A&M in the sixth round (161 overall), though they didn’t mean to. In ’91, the combine was still in its early stages, but the league did perform drug tests on those they invited. Lewis failed his drug test, causing many teams to remove him from their boards. That includes the Bears. So how did they wind up drafting him? It turns out there were two running backs named Lewis in the 1991 NFL draft: Greg Lewis out of Washington in addition to the Aggies’ Lewis. According to reports, the Bears took the wrong Lewis off their board, then accidentally took the rusher struggling with off-field issues. Perhaps not surprisingly, the he lasted less than three seasons, getting cut by the Bears in 1993. As of last year, he was in jail after a series of petty crimes.

There are also a series of disagreements between scouts on teams that lead to players falling through the cracks. Longtime NFL scout Bill Groman illustrated this by telling this story at our first-ever seminar for parents of draft-eligible players in 2010.

“Dominic Rhodes was at Midwestern State, I think was the name of the school. . . Back then I was a national cross-check scout (for the Falcons), and I was in the Dallas area, up in that area, covering another school, and I thought I’d run into the school. Another guy had gone and seen him and given him a free agent grade. He was about 5-foot-8 and a half, 5-9, a short guy, and about 205 pounds, but I saw him run real fast, and I like speed, you know, and athletic ability, and I saw he had some stats, and he could really (play).

“I went and looked at film and tape on him, and then I stayed over on Saturday and went to the game. Shoot, the game I was at, I think he was at 200-some yards rushing, and did all kinds of stuff, so I wrote him up to be like a third- or fourth-round pick and make somebody’s team. The other (scout), I know what he was looking at was the fact that this was a Division II school, he doesn’t play against the great big guys, but I think offensive linemen, defensive linemen, from those schools, yeah, they aren’t playing against the big guys, but when you’re a skilled athlete, a receiver, a defensive back, a running back, I don’t care who you’re playing with. If you can do it, you can do it. He just stood out so much, and what ended up happening was, I was at Atlanta at the time and Dan Reeves was our coach, and so what happened is, I wrote him up good, and this other guy had just given him a free-agent grade, and for some reason or other, our Director of Player Personnel at the time put him as a free agent, and we didn’t talk about them, so we didn’t talk about him in our meetings, so Dan didn’t know anything about him.

“Well, he gets drafted late by the Indianapolis Colts (Rhodes was actually signed as an undrafted free agent after the ’01 draft), and doesn’t play, like, the first 5-6 games, and then they come and play at Atlanta, and the starting running back (Edgerrin James) gets hurt. Dominic starts the game and gets like 170-some yards rushing (Rhodes ran for 177 yards on 29 carries with two TDs in a 41-27 Colts win), and I get a telephone call Monday from Dan, and he said something about, well, this guy runs so well, and you know, I said just go look at my grade, which he did.”

For more stories from Bill, check out our video archive at Inside the League.

For another story discussing how players fall through the cracks, check out this interview I did with former Cowboys scout Jim Hess. In this YouTube clip (the interview starts at :34), Jim discusses how he, along with then-Cowboys quarterbacks coach Sean Payton, came to like an Eastern Illinois passer named Tony Romo. From obscurity, Hess and Payton came to champion Romo, so much so that he turned down a more lucrative UFA offer from Denver to sign with the Cowboys after the ’03 draft.