Here’s a question I get all the time: how do players slip through the cracks? How do players go undrafted, then wind up having Pro Bowl careers? Priest Holmes, Kurt Warner, James Harrison, Tony Romo, Arian Foster, Wes Welker and Antonio Gates are among players who, despite advanced modern evaluation, extensive media coverage and teams of evaluators scouring the country 11 months out of the year, were not drafted but went on to stardom in the league.

I asked former Jets scout Joe Bommarito this question. He had an interesting answer.

“Nobody slips through,” he said. “This is a misconception. No player is overlooked, not because of his school, or record, or position, or any other consideration. Scouts evaluate every eligible player for the draft on school visits. No rock is left unturned. Whether a player has a first-round grade or a free-agent grade on him, that is what he has earned throughout his collegiate career. There have been first-round players who have not lived up to it, and free-agent players who have excelled. It doesn’t mean they have been overlooked, it just means that is the grade they have earned in their collegiate career.”

I respect Joe’s opinion but I’m not sure I agree, for several reasons.

• I think there are biases that, at the very least, affect the grades players are given. For example, players from losing teams are often seen as less enticing by scouts.
• Some teams give more weight to the preseason grades National and BLESTO give players, and when schools in remote places don’t have players with draftable grades, at times they’re skipped altogether.
• There are players that come from out-of-the-way places that just don’t get the same exposure as players at schools in BCS conferences, for example.
• There are also players like Matt Cassel, who was a backup at USC for Carson Palmer. Though he was drafted in the seventh round in 2005, 25 picks before the end, obviously he was far more talented than the ‘grade’ he received in college. His ‘grade’ was affected by his low usage due to sitting behind a Heisman winner.
• There are also several schools that give limited access to their players — Penn State was like this under Joe Paterno — or whose coaches have no idea how the draft process and evaluation really work (and yes, there are many coaches who don’t know or don’t care, even today).

I’m always looking for stories of draft-day intrigue. It breaks down the myth that all teams know exactly how the draft should look, how players are rated, and where they fit into the rankings. It just illustrates that this is a human business where people don’t always agree, and even the biggest names in the business make mistakes (and sometimes succeed despite themselves).

I asked Mike to pass along a couple of recollections of such times during his 18 years in the game. He had a couple interesting memories.

“I am trying to think of specific players but there was an argument in Dallas where there were two (defensive backs) on the board and I wanted one over the other, but was overruled by the head coach.  We got both of them but was mad that it happened the way it did.  The player I wanted stuck, where the other was released.  Now it has happened the other way around as well. Felt good about getting a player but currently has not panned out like I thought he would or should.”

I found this really interesting. Mike has too much class to name the head coach, but he had two during his three years (2005-7) with the team, Bill Parcells and Wade Phillips. Based on what I know of both coaches (though I’ve only met Coach Phillips personally), he has to be discussing Parcells. Though a Hall of Fame coach, Parcells has been known to be (a) rigid and (b) wrong on draft day. For what it’s worth, at least Parcells’ staff had the sense to keep the good player, even though he wasn’t the head coach’s ‘guy.’ To Mike’s credit, he doesn’t try to characterize that defensive back as a star today. It’s an inexact science, for sure.

For Mike’s second story, he’s a little more specific.

“The worst one that stuck with me was (OT) Cordy Glenn from Georgia(, who went on to be drafted in the second round by the Bills in 2012). I had some people on my side, but when it came down to the last meetings before the draft, the whole room had changed.  Something happened, and now there was a consensus that Cordy was overweight and had weight issues, which I vehemently disagreed with.  We took (OT Jonathan) Martin from Stanford, but Buffalo took Cordy the pick before, so it was a moot point, but (I was) very discouraged with the flip in the room, and some of the comments made about the player which were absolutely false.”

Glenn remains with the Bills as a starter on the offensive line, while everyone knows how the Martin story worked out. Mike would never say that he saw how that story would unfold. Still, it’s interesting to see how the scouts who’ve spent time on the road evaluating players can be evaluated when there’s sudden momentum against a player, and a group dynamic evolves. I’d give anything to know what prompted that ‘momentum,’ and it it was perhaps media-driven. I guess we’ll never know.

If there’s one question I always get, especially from my newer agent clients but also from my more seasoned ones, it’s ‘how do you find a sleeper?’ Where are the seniors who come out of nowhere, climb the charts over the last weeks of the season, test well, and wind up on NFL rosters?

I can’t say I have the answer to that. In fact, at last year’s combine, I had lunch with one of the more seasoned scouts in the game, a great guy and a great friend. I asked him this question, and he didn’t really have an answer, either. In discussing it with him, my takeaway was that most teams spend about two-thirds of their time on the guys who’ll be taken in the top third of the draft roughly, i.e., rounds 1-3. Most teams see these guys as the real difference-makers, the players that will make or break their rosters, so they want to spend an inordinate amount of time on these particular players. The ones who go in rounds 4-7 — most typically the players we’d characterize as sleepers — aren’t seen as players who will help you win titles. They may be solid starters in time, and might even develop into stars, but the risk isn’t worth the reward, generally. Teams get busy, they can’t apply the resources to evaluating everybody, and players fall through the cracks.

So what’s the best way to find guys that are ‘under the radar’ or ‘off the grid?’ Here’s my take on it.

• One way is to find players who were jucos that don’t have a lengthy body of work at the four-year college level and bloom late. I know there is very little evaluation done at the JC level, mostly because players don’t go from a juco to the draft very often.

• A second way is to find a college basketball player who just switched to football (i.e., the Saints’ Jimmy Graham or Chargers’ Antonio Gates). There’s a tight end at Indianapolis, Erik Swoope, whom we’ve mentioned previously that fits this profile for the 2014 draft class.

• Another way is to find players who didn’t play football until college, or very little high school ball, especially if they came from other countries (a la Detroit’s Zeke Ansah or Indy’s Bjoern Woerner or Oakland’s Menelik Watson, all from the ‘13 draft class).

• A fourth way is to find guys who switched to impact positions late (usually before their senior seasons, but maybe even mid-season). These are typically tight ends who move to OT, or maybe DTs who move to OG, or whatever. Less frequently, you find RBs or WRs that move to CB, or even QBs who move to WO. But all of these qualify.

• The fifth way is to find a good player at an un-sexy position – he’s good, but not high-impact – who plays either in the far Northeast (Maine/New Hampshire/Rhode Island, etc.) or the Southwest/Mountain West (West Texas/Utah/Nevada/New Mexico/Idaho/Montana/Dakotas). A good example for the ’14 draft class is New Mexico C Dillon Farrell, who signed with the 49ers as an undrafted free agent this spring. They’re trying him at tackle.

• A sixth way is to find pure track stars that will ‘test out of the gym’ but who aren’t really ‘football players’ yet (but want to give it a try). Florida WR Jeff Demps is an example of this from the ’13 draft class; he’s a guy that’s got great tools that is still developing as a player.

There may be other ways. I know no one has the ‘patent’ on this, but these seem to be the patterns for most players who come out of nowhere, figuratively speaking, and enjoy NFL success.

We’ve kind of danced around over the past couple weeks, touching on agent topics one day and scout topics the next, and rarely keeping a steady narrative. Once again, we’ll step away from our recent path for a story about agent recruiting.

I remember in the Fall of 2007 or 2008 watching a mid-week college game pitting Nevada and another mid-major team from out West, and the Wolfpack’s quarterback was sensational. His name was Colin Kaepernick, and he was tall and rangy (the new draft buzzword is “length”) and could really run. In fact, he left the pocket for several long gainers during the game. He also had a rocket for an arm; the broadcasters said he had an extensive baseball background with a fastball in the 90s, and I believed it. Though he ran an offense some considered gimmicky (the Pistol) and was still pretty raw, he had undeniable tools and was very productive. I filed him away mentally as a player to watch.

Sometime in late 2010, I remember speaking to Scott Smith of XAM Sports, and he let slip that he’d been recruiting Kaepernick. I was really enthusiastic about Kaep and I let him know, and pretty soon we were recounting how each of us had seen that same mid-week game some years ago and really become excited about his potential. As we continued our discussion, it became pretty clear that XAM had made recruiting Kaep the centerpiece of its efforts for the 2011 NFL draft, and though several mid-sized firms had reached out to the family, Scott liked his chances, having developed an excellent rapport with his parents. That turned out to be a real winning formula, as Kaep was leaning on his mom and dad to handle the vetting process for him.

As his senior season progressed and it became obvious that he was a special player, some of the big firms moved in. I remember finding out that CAA’s Ken Kremer entered the recruiting process very late and made a strong push because the agency had (and has) so much juice, but eventually, Scott called me to tell me XAM was getting Kaepernick. He signed, was drafted early in the second round by the 49ers in 2011, and remains a player who’s not ‘there’ yet, but whose needle is certainly pointing up. You could certainly argue that he’s the best quarterback in his draft class.

It’s truly a rarity for a mid-sized firm to ‘steal’ a big player, but it was a bit of a perfect storm of conditions surrounding Kaep. They were:

His head coach, Chris Ault, is old-school, with no agent ties: Many big-school head coaches make little or no secret of their relationships to agents and regularly make referrals. There are absolutely no rules restricting this practice. However, Nevada’s head coach at the time is not that way. Not at all.

Parents played a key role: Sometimes, a player’s parents make no effort to get educated or assist in the process. Even when they do, many prospects make their agent choices without consulting their parents. Neither was the case with Kaep. His parents were an essential part of the process.

He played at remote school: Even in the age of air travel and the Internet, prospects who play at schools in the less populous states in the Southwest and ‘Mountain West’ — Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, etc. — are more prone to getting overlooked, both by NFL scouts and agents.

He was rated as barely draftable: Agents lean heavily on the ratings services the NFL uses to gauge players’ ability going into their senior seasons, and he was registering as a seventh-rounder who was firmly on the draft bubble going into his senior season.

Other QBs were getting all the press: Remember, in ’11, Cam Newton was the clear ‘it’ player and went No. 1 overall, and three other signal-callers went in the first round (Locker, Gabbert and Ponder), all from BCS schools with strong pedigrees. It’s been my experience that the media, and even NFL teams in some cases, get more excited about junior prospects as there’s some measure of ‘senior fatigue.’ Kaepernick was perceived as far less safe than the five signal-callers (Newton, Locker, Gabbert, Ponder and Dalton) who went before him.

We’ll have more about the game inside the game Thursday.