This week, I wanted to pass along one more note for NFL scouting hopefuls that may or may not help.

When I moved to Houston in ’97, I wanted nothing more than to work on the Houston Chronicle’s sports desk. I was already a Chronicle employee, but I worked for a section of the paper called ThisWeek, a zoned advertising circular that was one step above being a janitor.

Anyway, on Fridays in the fall, the sports department would put out a call to everyone in the building for help during high school football. Of course, I volunteered, but I didn’t really get to show what I could do. The job I had was pretty much to answer the phone and enter statistical information about whatever game the caller had. I sat in a room with about 50 people, and the job we did was about what a monkey could do. But hey, it was pay, and for me, I felt like I was getting closer to hitting the big-time.

However, because I was there, I got to know a few people on the desk, so when the Olympics created extra work, or when the Super Bowl came to town, I got the call. It was after one of those sessions that the sports editor wound up offering me a job on the desk, the one thing I had always wanted. I turned it down, of course, but that’s another story.

The point is, the only reason I got a shot was because I happened to be in Houston, and happened to hear of an opportunity, and after a short time, the right people got to know me and gave me a shot. I wasn’t any better than maybe thousands of people who could do the same work, but the point was that I was already in Houston.

I spoke to two young, aspiring scouts this week, and both of them are located within the metro area of an NFL team. They’ve already learned what it took me years to learn, and they’ve made key contacts with teams and they’re working to make their dreams a reality. As a result, I think both of them have at least a 50-50 shot. But if they weren’t in a specific geographical region, I doubt it would ever happen.

If you are serious about becoming an NFL scout, I recommend you do the same thing. Find a way to get to a nearby town with an NFL team, then find a way to get inside that building. Maybe it’s securing a job working in ticket sales, or volunteering to help with a football-related event (maybe a player’s summer football camp), or anything else that gets you close to someone in the game.

If you can’t get to an NFL city, go to the biggest football-playing school near you and volunteer to do anything. Sweep the floors if necessary. But you’ve got to get your face in front of people who could make things happen for you. Being there is absolutely crucial.

We got a lot of feedback and traction with our post last Friday discussing a scout dismissed by an NFL team with a serious medical condition. I thought I’d follow up with good news. Maybe it sends you off on the holiday weekend on a positive note.

I got a call today from the person who originally told me about the recently dismissed scout’s plight. He said things are moving in the right direction. I was told that the owner of the scout’s former team got a phone call from an NFL head coach, and the coach was angry. He expressed his frustration to the owner — who apparently had been left in the dark. Now the owner is angry, and he’s moving heaven and earth to resolve things.

The scout, who had a year left on his deal, is still getting paid, but his insurance, which was to expire in six months, is no longer an issue. The owner has assured him the team will see him through his medial situation, no matter what it takes. In addition, the scout, who wished to remain anonymous, gets to remain so.

Now that things have taken a good turn, it will be interesting to see how (if?) it plays out in the media. With this resolution, it’s a perfect time for someone to put a nice bow on things, to talk about how matters with such gravity transcend hirings and firings. Who knows? Maybe even the NFL machine picks it up to make it seem like a heart-warming sign of humanity within a game seen as ultra-violent and volatile. But you’ll know the truth.

At the end of the day, I guess, it doesn’t matter. A man who’s a father and a husband gets some peace of mind. Still, it’s something to watch for in the coming weeks especially as news gets slow and the league looks to turn attention away from Deflategate.

Have a wonderful Memorial Day and don’t forget why we celebrate. May God bless you and your family this weekend.

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):